Fahm: An Arabic Pop-up Dictionary

An Arabic Pop-up dictionary

After having started to learn Arabic, I was frustrated by the lack of Arabic pop-up dictionary. I was looking for something similar to rikaichan or Zhongwen for Japanese and Chinese.

Arabic, like Japanese or Chinese has a writing system for which inferring the reading is not straightforward. I wanted a way to easily look up a word vocalization (i.e. via a small pop-up).

As far as I know, such pop-up dictionary did not exist until I made Fahm (“فهم”, meaning “understanding”), an extension for Google Chrome. Basically, hovering your mouse over any Arabic word inside your browser will open a pop-up window containing a translation.

Fahm

Look-up results include vocalization, English translation, stem, word category and a morphological analysis. Morphological analysis and dictionary files that are used are based on the Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer. Of course, a single look-up can retrieve more than one morphological match; it is left to the user to infer the correct match in the given context. This extension allows even beginners of Arabic to enjoy online content as soon as they start, while it unmistakenly saves advanced learner from having to look up a word manually in a dictionary whenever they find a word whose meaning or pronunciation is unknown.

Install Fahm for Google Chrome!

Contributions are most welcome .