Ibn Manzur (Arabic: ابن منظور) (June–July 1233 - December 1311/January 1312) was an Arabic lexicographer and author of a large dictionary called Lisan al-Arab. His full name was: Muhammad ibn Mukarram ibn Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Manzur al-Ansari al-Ifriqi al-Misri al-Khazradschi Jamaladin Abu al-Fadl (Arabic محمد بن مكرم بن علي بن أحمد بن منظور الأنصاري الإفريقي المصري الخزرجي جمال الدين أبو الفضل)
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Ibn Manzur was born in 1233. He was a moderate Shi'i and traced his descendance back to Ruwayfiʿ b. Ṯābit al-Anṣārī, who became the Arabic governor of Tripoli in 668. Ibn Hajar reports that he was Qadi there and spent his life as clerk in the Diwan al-Insha', an office that was responsible among other things for correspondence, archiving and copying.[1] Fück assumes to be able to identify him with Muḥammad b. Mukarram, who was one of the secretaries of this institution (the so called Kuttāb al-Inshāʾ) under Qalawun. Following Brockelmann, Ibn Manzur studied philology. He dedicated most of his life to excerpts from works of historical philology. He is said to have left 500 volumes of this work. He died around the turn of the years 1311/1312 in Cairo.
The Lisan al-Arab (لسان العرب, "The Arab Tongue") was completed by Ibn Manzur in 1290. Occupying 20 printed book volumes (in the most frequently cited edition) it is among the best-known and most comprehensive dictionaries of the Arabic language. Ibn Manzur compiled it from other sources, to a large degree. The most important sources for it were the Tahdhīb al-Lugha of Azharī, the Muḥkam of Ibn Sidah, the Nihāya of al-Dhahabi and Jauhari's Ṣiḥāḥ as well as the glosses of the latter (Kitāb at-Tanbīh wa-l-Īḍāḥ) by Ibn Barrī. It follows the Ṣiḥāḥ in the arrangement of the roots: The headwords are not arranged by the alphabetical order of the radicals as usually done today in the study of Semitic languages, but according to the last radical [2] - which makes finding rhyming endings significantly easier. Furthermore, the Lisan al-Arab notes its direct sources, but not or seldom their sources, making it hard to trace the linguistic history of certain words. Ibn Murtada corrected this in his Taj al-Arus, that itself goes back to the Lisan. The Lisan, according to Ignatius d'Ohsson, was already printed in the 18th century in Istanbul,[3] thus fairly early for the Islamic world.