Completion of Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic marked at ceremony in Qatar

The completion of the Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language, one of the most ambitious lexicographical projects in Arabic history, was formally marked on Monday at a ceremony held in Lusail, Doha, Qatar, bringing to a close more than a decade of institutional scholarly work tracing the language's development across twenty centuries.

The ceremony took place at Katara Hall in the Fairmont Raffles Hotel and was held under the patronage of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani who was in attendance. It was organised by the dictionary project in cooperation with the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies.

The dictionary documents the evolution of Arabic vocabulary from its earliest written attestations to contemporary usage, recording semantic, structural, and contextual shifts over time. Compiled since 2013, it is built on a verified digital corpus of around one billion words drawn from Arabic texts across historical periods and regions.

In a message marking the occasion on X, Sheikh Tamim described the dictionary as a civilisational achievement that reinforces attachment to Arab identity while enabling confident engagement with modernity, praising the collective effort behind the project.

"In Qatar, we take pride in the completion of the Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language, which, through its rich content, strengthens our peoples’ attachment to their identity while enabling them to engage confidently with the modern age and its tools. This occasion also provides an opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this historic civilisational achievement, whose completion and various stages of accomplishment we regard as a manifestation of fruitful Arab integration," he wrote.

The ceremony featured a keynote address (Ar.) by Azmi Bishara, Director-General of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, who framed the project as the fulfilment of a long-standing scholarly commitment to the Arabic language. Bishara said the dictionary was designed to allow Arabic texts to be understood according to the meanings words carried at the time of their use, rather than through contemporary projections, describing the absence of such a tool as a longstanding obstacle for Arab and non-Arab researchers alike.

He emphasised that compiling a historical dictionary required not only tracing meanings, but building and cleansing a vast digital corpus, identifying the earliest dated attestations for each meaning, and digitising material spanning centuries in which Arabic was often under-documented. That effort, he said, had also produced a linguistic database with applications beyond humanities research, including in Arabic-language computing and artificial intelligence.

"We are not announcing its perfection, but the completion of its compilation as a project,” Bishara said, stressing that the dictionary would require continuous revision and updating.

Bishara also highlighted the broader cultural and political significance of the project, arguing that large-scale scholarly undertakings require a place where long-term work can be sustained in an environment of intellectual freedom. He said the decision to name the work the “Doha Dictionary” reflected thirteen years of consistent institutional patronage, rather than symbolic branding.

Speaking also at the ceremony, the dictionary’s executive director, Ezzedine al-Bouchikhi, said the project restored the historical method to the study of Arabic by tracing words through their lived contexts rather than treating meanings as static. He described the dictionary as the result of cumulative institutional work, noting that it places Arabic alongside a small number of major world languages with comprehensive historical dictionaries.

Qatar’s Minister of Education and Higher Education, Lolwah al-Khater, described the dictionary as a major educational resource that would support the teaching of Arabic by helping students and researchers understand how concepts and terminology evolved over time.

Salem al-Malik, Director-General of the ICESCO, said the project represented a qualitative addition to the Arab and global linguistic landscape.

The ceremony also marked the launch of a new digital portal for the dictionary, offering advanced search tools that allow users to trace the historical development of words and their meanings. Organisers said the project’s completion marked the beginning of a new phase focused on research use, education, and language technologies, rather than its conclusion.