Edward William Lane

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Edward William Lane

Edward William Lane (September 17, 1801, Hereford, England—August 10, 1876, Worthing, Sussex) was a noted scholar of the Arabic language and Arabic literature.

He was the son of an English clergyman, a prebendary, of Hereford, England. He was born in Hereford and sent to university at Cambridge, with the plan that he should enter his father's profession. However, he abandoned the university and moved to London, where he trained to become an engraver.

He was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis, then known as consumption, and advised to remove to a warm dry climate. He sailed to Egypt in 1825.

While in Egypt, he devoted himself to the study of Arabic, Arabic literature, and Islam, observed Egyptian manners and customs, and adopted the dress and habits of an Egyptian man of learning.

He returned to England in 1828, with the draft of a travel book embellished with his own drawings. After many rejections, he finally found a publisher -- however, rather than putting the book through the press in its original form, he insisted on revisiting Egypt in 1833 to check or expand his earlier observations.

The resulting book, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, was published in 1838 and became a surprise best-seller.

From 1838 through 1840, he issued the several volumes of his translation of The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). This too was a great popular success.

He was married in 1840, to a woman of Greek descent.

After publishing a book of translations of excerpts from the Qur'an, he decided to assemble a dictionary and thesaurus of Arabic. He returned to Egypt in 1842 to work on his book. He stayed in Egypt until 1849, when he made his final return to England. Until his death in 1876, he worked unceasingly on his gigantic dictionary -- which was, unfortunately, unfinished at the time of his death. It was completed by his nephew, S. L. Poole and published in 1893 as the Arabic English Lexicon.