The Concise Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary

click here for more details, find new or used items	Our price £12.99 (£19.99) New from £10.78 Used from £12.20 Pages: 461 (Hardcover) Editor: N. S. Doniach ISBN: 0198643217 Pub: OUP Oxford Pub date: 1983-01-20 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 132701

Reader Reviews:

Very poor typesetting. (12/12 people found this helpful)

I bought this dictionary in the hope that it would supplement Hans Wehr's Arabic-English dictionary as a way to look up English words in Arabic. This book fails to be useful in a number of ways:

Firstly, the typsetting is tiny and illegible. Many Arabic characters look like they have been manually written in rather than actually typeset in a crisp font. This makes reading very difficult, especially for beginner/intermediate learners.

Secondly, there is no vocalization of the Arabic words, making it difficult to get a good feeling for the word. Though it can be argued that once you have the right word, you can look it up in Wehr to find out how to vocalize it, you would expect such an exercise to be more efficient... after all, this is a dictionary!

Thirdly, there isn't any clear organisation and cross-referencing of words. It's just basically a long list of (sometimes illegible) words. For example, looking up "Eat" will give you this big blurb, starting with "AKL" and a whole other bunch of words which the beginner would have no clue how to interpret. So then, does the Arabic word for eat just come from "AKL", or does it include the blurb afterwards?

These three issues seriously cringe any additional productivity this book might offer you. Over the time I've had it, it's served more as a paperweight than a reference.

No frills, and not very user-friendly. (56/62 people found this helpful)

If you're thinking of buying this dictionary then you may well be someone like me, i.e. an English speaker who is beginning to learn Arabic, and if this is the case I think you will be disappointed.
The dictionary is simply very basic. It is an English word list with Arabic translations at the side. This means that if you come across a new Arabic word and you want to know what it means you won't be able to find out using this dictionary; you can only look up English words and find their Arabic translation. It does not include romanistations. It does not include any extra material such as a pronunciation guide, introduction to the Arabic script, verb tables, grammatical information or cultural information. There is a one page introduction in English that doesn't tell you anything useful, then the word list, and that's it.
I think this dictionary would probably be fairly useful for a native Arabic speaker with intermediate English. If this is not you then I wouldn't buy it. I bought it and I almost never use it - mainly because there are better dictionary resources freely available on the internet (just do a google search for "Arabic dictionary") that let you search for English or Arabic words.
You may think it unreasonable to expect more from a 'concise' dictionary in this price range, but go look at a concise Spanish-English dictionary - you will get a basic introduction to Spanish pronunciation, you will probably get verb tables and it will have an English-Spanish half and a Spanish-English half.

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