“Copious without order, energetic without rules”: this is how the English language appeared to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and so, too, must Arabic have seemed to its first lexicographers some thousand years earlier. It was at this time that Sībawayhi (d. c. 183/799)) created the grammar which would henceforth rule the energy of Arabic, while his master al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad (d. 175/791) brought order to its copiousness by laying the foundations of lexicography (ʿilm al-lughah, “the science of language”). Just a few years after the publication of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the Arab lexicographical tradition reached its peak in the gigantic Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-qāmūs (begun in 1174/1760, finished 1188/1774) of al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1791), which is a summation of the entire heritage, a triumph of cumulation incorporating every significant work directly or indirectly, from al-Khalīl onwards. There is hardly an item in the following sketch of the evolution of the classic dictionaries which has not found its way into the Tāj.

The formal lexicon is not the only product of the Arabs' interest in their language, however, and, before dealing with the standard dictionaries, some attention must be given to the other kinds of word-lists and alphabetically arranged reference works which emerged at the same time. These, though often subsumed in later dictionaries, are in no way their ancestors but had a separate existence and continued to appear side by side with them.