The Complete Dictionary of Levantine Arabic Idioms

-  Preface

-  A guide on how to use this book

-  What’s new in this edition

-  Chapter One Men’s Idioms

-  Chapter Two Women’s Idioms

-  Chapter Three Folk Idioms

-  Chapter Four Everyone’s Idioms

Preface

The everyday dialect you find in Syria or between Syrians around the world now is unique and full of words and sentences that are far away from Formal Arabic. Historians consider that the Syrian dialect has a huge number of words that were made as a mixture between the Aramaic and the Syriac languages that prevailed in Syria in the past, alongside Arabic that came later to the region.

Syrian soap operas helped during the past years in introducing the Syrian dialect into the different Arab communities in the Arab world and introduced these unique words and sentences and made them an understandable dialect for most of Arabic speakers.

A lot of these idioms are unique and confined to the Syrian communities, while other idioms are mutual with the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Jordanian dialects.

Many of these idioms nowadays are recent, some cannot be understood by elders, and the majority of these idioms was born by coincidence and prevailed among young people.

A guide on how to use this book

As the learners of Arabic know, there are a lot of Arabic letters that have no equivalent in English. Therefore, we have used some punctuation marks to refer to some letters while we used a combination of letters to refer to others.

E: The (e) sound in most of the words refers to the diacritical mark fatha.

U: the (u) sound is similar to a long O as in boots.

Sh: ش

Dh: ض

Kh: خ

Gh: غ

H: can be ح or هـ, you will understand the difference since the Arabic word is provided.

The letters ع and ء are referred to in this dictionary with an apostrophe. Again, the usage of the letters in Arabic will tell you which is which.

What’s new in this edition

-  More than 130 new idioms were added.

-  We have added teshkeel to the Arabic script to make reading easier.

-  We have broken the words into syllables and added them in italic. Breaking the words into syllable is a great spelling strategy to help you spell long words.

-  A different Arabic font was chosen in this edition. The Arabic text is clearer and easier to read.

Chapter One

Men’s