How do poets name love? A data-driven exploration of 14 Arabic words for love that traces their etymological roots, poetic functions, and shifting meanings across twelve historical eras. Using a 2-million-verse corpus and sentiment analysis, the analysis shows how word choice maps to emotional polarity and co‑occurrence communities, revealing that poets consistently exploit subtle lexical differences to shape tone, intensity, and literary effect. The data and code for this project is available on GitHub.

Introduction

Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri, the famed poet and linguist who had lost his sight, once entered a gathering of scholars. As he made his way through the crowd, he accidentally stepped on a man’s foot. Irritated and not realizing who stood before him, the man blurted out, “Who is this dog that couldn’t see me?” Offended, Abu al-‘Ala was quick with his reply, “The dog is the one who does not know seventy names for a dog.”¹

One might think this little anecdote illustrating the richness of the Arabic language is an exaggeration, but it is not. Not even in the slightest! Arabic has a rich and extensive vocabulary. Scholars have compiled books listing the synonyms of various Arabic words: For example, there are 70 words to describe honey, 200 names for a snake, and 400 words for a lion! Yes, 400!² That may be a bit extreme and may seem redundant. After all, do we really need so many words for a lion?

To grasp this, we need to appreciate the role language played in Arab society. Before the rise of Islam, most Arabs were not literate, and poetry was the primary medium of communication³. It carried news, preserved history, and told stories. Through verse, events were immortalized. Poets held such influence that a single line could disgrace an entire tribe or elevate it to honor⁴. Out of this deep reverence for words, the Arabs became unrivaled masters of their language as repetition in oral poetry was frowned upon. A great poet had to show mastery by avoiding redundancy, constantly reaching for new words, metaphors, and imagery. This drove poets to constantly preserve, invent, and refine synonyms.

Not only did that result in an insane number of synonyms, but each synonym carries a slightly different and nuanced meaning! Let’s stick with lion for a moment. Don’t worry, we will not go through the 400 words, but here are a few to demonstrate the different shades of meaning, each evoking different qualities and characteristics. For instance: The basic and common word for lion is أَسَدْ (asad). But when the lion is praised for its courage, you call it لَيْث (layth). If it charges so fiercely that even camels scatter, it is a قَسْوَرَة (Qaswara). A massive, crushing lion is called a هِزَبْر (hizabr), while a biting, wide-jawed lion is a ضَيْغَم (daygham). If the lion is wild and ferocious, they call it ضِرْغَامْ (dirgham). And when poets wanted a word for majesty and awe, they used غَضَنْفَرْ (ghadanfar) or حَيْدَرَة (haydara) (these names were so noble they became epithets for warriors).

If you were ever thinking about learning Arabic in any serious manner, this might have scared you off completely! But don’t be discouraged. As a native Arabic speaker, I only know one word for lion! Because we only use one in daily colloquial conversations. I know one word for honey, one word for water, one for flimflam, etc. Because fortunately, none of us is a pre-Islamic era Bedouin tribe-spokesperson poet fighting for the honor of their tribe with that killer verse by plugging in that sweet, sweet synonym!

But I digress. We’re not here to talk about lions. If you’re anything like Van Halen, you might have noticed from the title of this post that so far I Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, so let’s move on to the main course. The linguistic richness of the Arabic language is not limited to animals. It has an astonishing variety of words for love, each capturing different facets of this complex emotion. Given that poetry was the main form of artistic expression in the pre-Islamic era, and that love was a recurrent theme in the poetry of that era, it is no surprise that more than 50 words⁵ of love exist today as a result of that early interest.

The Semantic Field of Love

In classical Arabic, the semantic field of love is treated as one half of a spectrum that contains love and hate. On one side of the spectrum lies love, made up of 14 distinct stages, while on the opposite side lies hate with its own stages⁶. The stages of love start with inclination and infatuation, leading into growth and proliferation, and culminate in either madness or self-sacrifice for the beloved. To paraphrase from The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures⁶: If love is like the pull of electric charges, hate works in reverse as repulsion. It starts with indifference, intensifies into hostility, and at its peak becomes the urge to cause harm. At its core, love creates and multiplies, while hate destroys and annihilates. However, the extremes of love can be just as dangerous as those of hate, only instead of hurting others, love taken too far turns its harm inward.

But here we will only focus on the “love” half of the spectrum. As mentioned earlier, there are over 50 synonyms for love in Arabic, all with their small nuances, but here we will only consider 14 of the most common words as they have been shown in studies to represent distinct psychological stages⁶. You will see that most of the words of love either evolved from another word or are derived from roots that are unrelated to love itself. In Arabic, these words of love represent emotions or psychological states that resemble some feeling that is inspired by the root from which it is derived. You will understand as we delve into them one by one. Let’s start with the most neutral words on the spectrum and finish with the most extreme.

هَوَى (hawa):
Hawa means an inclination toward something or someone. The word originally refers to “air” and the “void”, and by extension conveys the idea of “falling into emptiness”. From this sense arises hawa as a term for succumbing to the passions of the soul, or more simply: “falling in love”. It is derived from a root that means “to blow”. This first stage of love is thus seen as fleeting, much like the wind; it is unavoidable, and it can rise and fall.
وُدّ (wudd):
Wudd signifies a warm and tender affection, often used to describe the love between friends or family, but can also refer to romantic love in its early stages, where there is a wish to get close to someone.
حُبّ (hubb):
Hubb is the most common verbal noun for “love” in Arabic. The word hubb is derived from the same root as the word “seed”. Hubb is seen to resemble a seed, capable of growing, giving life, and branching out like a tree through procreation. Yet its origin lies in an invisible intention of the heart, much like a hidden seed beneath the soil.
شَغَفْ (shaghaf):
The word originally means the outer membrane of the heart. Shaghaf refers to the passion that has surpassed the outer “superficial” attraction and has reached the core, and has completely covered the heart.
صَبابَة (sababa):
Sababa comes from the root of the Arabic word, which means “to pour” or “to spill”. This reflects the idea of love as spilling the essence of one’s heart onto someone else, symbolizing deep faithfulness in love.
عِشْق (‘ishq):
‘Ishq is a very common word for love that comes from the word عَشَّ (‘assha), which means “to be nested in”. In a sense, the lover is now nested🥚 in their beloved. At this stage, the lover is said to be inseparable from their beloved.
وَلَعْ (wala’):
Wala’ comes from a word that means “burning”. This is a psychological state that resembles “catching on fire”. This is not a poetic expression, but this word refers to incredible pain that actually resembles being burned. We can see here that we have moved into the more extreme side of the spectrum of love.
غَرَامْ (gharam):
It comes from the word “debt” or “the price one must pay”. Gharam was also used to describe the torture of hell (yes, we’re getting serious now!). At this stage, love resembles the inescapable torment that one feels when they are preoccupied with loving someone at all times.
هُيَامْ (huyam):
Quite simple, huyam is the madness of love. The word comes from an illness that afflicts camels and causes them to go thirsty and wander astray in the desert. It is an extreme feeling given how long a camel can go without water in the hot and dry desert. At this stage, love represents the total surrender of reason. A lover becomes overwhelmed, unable to envision existence apart from their beloved. Consumed entirely by passion, they drift away from reality and descend into the torment of madness. A striking example is Qais in Layla and Majnun. After Layla’s death, he grows numb and withdraws into a profound trance. In time, he loses all awareness of himself and the physical world, earning the name majnun (madman), and living in solitude until his eventual death.
تَيْم (taym):
Taym originally means enslavement. Since love is now etched in the heart and mind, the lover becomes enslaved to the object of their adoration. They are now chained to their beloved and refuse to let go of this love that consumes them.
وَلَهْ (walah):
Walah, very simply, refers to a state resembling losing one’s mind. You might be asking, isn’t that what huyam is? And the explanation of huyam was much cooler, so why is walah considered worse? Well, they might look the same if we just look at them outwardly (i.e., madness). But in fact, they differ in their moral weight. Whereas huyam is seen as a human weakness caused by excessive passion, walah is viewed as being so overcome with passion that it leads to the negligence of God.
جَوَى (jawa):
The word jawa means grief. As a synonym of love, it represents a psychological state where the lover feels they are being consumed from the inside, like they are being wasted away, like they are being internally burned with acid! It is a deep, burning, internal grief caused by unfulfilled love, longing, or heartbreak. Unlike the previous synonyms, jawa is not only an emotional madness, it’s a chronic sickness that is physically destructive.
فِتْنَة (fitna):
Fitna, like jawa, is a love that is physically destructive. At this stage, the lover is in a state of internal turmoil akin to the process of smelting gold in a furnace (I know it sounds weird, but you have to admit it doesn’t sound pleasant).
تَوْق (tawq):
And we’re at the final stage, tawq. It represents fighting one’s own psyche for the sake of the beloved to the extent of self-sacrifice (yes, we are at this point now!).

So let’s summarize what the spectrum of love looks like. The early stages of love begin with a simple attraction or leaning toward someone (hawa), followed by the stage of openly showing affection (wudd). This can then develop into hubb, a love marked by proliferation and growth. Beyond this third stage, there remain only three higher forms of love that carry no negative implications: the state of wholehearted attachment (shaghaf), the outpouring of the heart’s deepest feelings (sababa), and finally, the condition of complete inseparability from the beloved (‘ishq).

The seventh through fourteenth terms in this sequence carry underlying associations of emotional and physical harm. While poets, mystics, and storytellers have celebrated these words as expressions of deep love, their original roots suggest tones of caution, reproach, or warning. This critical sense is not directly stated in literary usage, but it remains embedded in the etymological origins of the words, which were first applied in contexts unrelated to love. Particularly, the early Arabic speaker had in mind that love can be similar to: catching on fire (wala’), being in debt or tortured in hell (gharam), being lost and thirsty in the desert (huyam), being enslaved (taym), losing one’s mind (walah), suffering your insides burning (jawa), suffering your body smelting in a furnace (fitna), and an internal struggle leading to sacrificing oneself (tawq).

An early Arab speaker could consciously perceive the emotional dangers attached to these words; However, as lexical usage evolved, writers and poets may have used these terms unconsciously to express intense cases of love⁶. I can say that personally, I was not aware of the presence of this negative side of the spectrum of love. I had encountered some of these words in Arabic poetry, but I never really understood the differences between them. In daily conversation, we only use three of these words (hubb, gharam, ‘ishq). Hubb is by far the most commonly used term, while gharam is a close second. I never truly grasped the nuances between hubb and gharam, except that I unconsciously would use gharam to denote a more passionate kind of love, whereas I would use hubb for a more general and pure sense of love. ‘Ishq is not a word we commonly use as is; we use the word عُشّاقْ (‘ushaq), which is derived from ‘ishq, and it means lovers. Valentine’s Day, for example, is called عِيدُ العُشّاقْ (‘id al ‘ushaq), which literally translates to the “Festival of Lovers.”

The Big Questions

With all that in mind, I set out to explore how these words are used in Arabic poetry as it has evolved over time. I had the following questions in mind:

Which of these words are most commonly prevalent in Arabic poetry?
How has the usage of these words changed over time periods?
Are there differences in usage between poets of different genders?
Do poets use multiple synonyms of love in the same poem? And if they do, which ones are most commonly paired together?
Regardless of the semantic differences, are there any patterns in how these words are practically used in poetry? Are certain words more associated with positive vs negative emotional tones?

Dataset

To answer these questions, I set out to find or scrape a large corpus of Arabic poetry. Luckily, I found a huge dataset of Arabic poetry from the classical pre-Islamic era all the way to modern times. The dataset, AraPoems⁷, is compiled from two online sources: Almausua and Aldiwan. It consists of more than 2 million verses of Arabic poetry, 165,220 poems, and 5,384 poets spanning 12 time periods.

Keyword Extraction

With the dataset in hand, I wrote a Python script to extract the occurrences of the 14 words of love in all the verses. But it is not as simple as just matching the word in the verse. For example, the word hubb can appear in several different forms. My initial solution was to match the root of the words (which is unique); however, the NLP tools for Arabic were not capable of doing what I needed for that. My next solution was to manually find all the possible lexemes for each word and to try to match them. With CAMeL Tools, I was capable of extracting and matching the lexemes of each word. But the next problem was that most words can have multiple meanings. For example, the lexeme for gharam can also mean “to fine”. So I manually went through the list of possible meanings of each lexeme and filtered out the ones that are unrelated to love.

I then created a JSON file functioning as a “glossary” with the 14 words I wish to extract, the acceptable lexemes for each word, and the acceptable meanings for each lexeme. Here is a sample of the glossary:

    "wala'": {
        "label": "ولع",
        "label_en": "wala'",
        "lemmas": [
            "ولع",
            "اولع",
            "مولع",
            "تولع"
        ],
        "gloss_include": [
            "passionate",
            "passion",
            "enamored",
            "desire",
            "be enamored",
            "fall in love"
        ]
    },
    "gharam": {
        "label": "غرام",
        "label_en": "gharam",
        "lemmas": [
            "غرام",
            "مغرم"
        ],
        "gloss_include": [
            "infatuation",
            "infatuated",
            "enamored"
        ]
    }

CAMeL Tools also provides a sentiment analysis tool, which was very useful for my analysis. It was able to predict the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of each verse of poetry. Finally, I was able to extract the occurrences of each love word in the verses by matching its lexeme and meaning to the glossary I built and stored them in a new dataset, along with the verse it was found in, the sentiment of the verse, the poem name, the poet, the poet’s gender, and the time period. The extracted dataset consists of 152,512 occurrences of a word of love in 57,024 unique poems!

Analysis

So let’s answer the simplest question: Which love word is most commonly prevalent in Arabic poetry?

The overall distribution of love words in the corpus

Hubb is by far the most common, taking over almost half of the occurrences of the love words. Given how prevalent hubb is in the modern Arabic languages, it is not surprising that it completely dominates the corpus. Hawa is in second place, and it takes a fair share at around 18%, followed by the rest of the words, where each takes a share of less than 10%.

Temporal Variations

Now let’s go a bit deeper. Has the prevalence of these love words changed over time periods?

Let’s take a broad look at the distribution of each of the words in different time periods⁸. The time periods or eras that are included in the dataset are: Pre-Islam (~610 CE), Seasoned⁹, Islamic (610-661), Umayyad (661–750), Andalusian (711-1492), Dual-eras¹⁰, Abbasid (750-1517), Fatimid (909–1171), Ayyubid (1171–1260), Mamluk (1250–1517), Ottoman (1517-1922), and Modern (1922~).

Evolution of Love Vocabulary in Arabic Poetry

We can see that hubb is the dominant love word in all periods, consistently between 40% and 55%. It is obviously the “core” word for love in Arabic. Hawa, our second most common synonym, has seen a rise in usage from the Pre-Islamic period and the seasoned era up to the Islamic era, and it remained relatively stable from then on. ‘Ishq was relatively absent in the early periods but drastically rose after the Umayyad period. This sudden rise can be explained by the emergence of Sufi poetry (Islamic Mysticism), where it became the preferred word for divine love. It became a core concept in the doctrine of Islamic Mysticism and is sometimes referred to as “the basis of creation”. Wudd fluctuates quite a bit over time, rising and falling, but seems to be the most popular in the early eras. Gharam is more interesting; it had a share of around 4% in the pre-Islam era, and then significantly went down in subsequent early eras, only to become popular again in later eras. It is surprisingly difficult to find information on the history of these words, so we can only try to speculate. This dip might have happened due to its single use in the Quran. It was mentioned once as a description of the suffering of hell. This might have caused the poets of the time to be extra cautious with the word and might have actively avoided it.

In general, we can see an overall pattern where hubb is the anchor word, hawa is the second most used word, ‘ishq and gharam are the late bloomers, and wudd is the old-fashioned term!

Now, let’s test whether these patterns are significant. To test whether the distribution of love words depends on the time period, we can run a \(\chi^2\) (pronounced chi-squared) test of independence.

The dreaded terminology alert: I will take a moment to explain the \(\chi^2\) test as painlessly as possible. If you already know it, feel free to ignore this box. If you don’t know and you don’t care, just know that it’s a statistical test to determine whether there is a significant association between two variables.

The \(\chi^2\) Test

Let’s explain the \(\chi^2\) test with a very simple example. Imagine you walk into a bookstore. You see that there is one section per book genre in the bookstore. And the sections look the same size, so now you have the expectation that the bookstore is stocked pretty evenly across genres. But as you walk around, you notice that the mystery shelves are packed full of books, the romance shelves hold just a few books, the history section has tons of books, and the sci-fi shelves have almost none. This is where the \(\chi^2\) test shines; it will answer the following question for you:

“Are these differences just random, or are they too big to be explained by chance? Do customers (or the librarians) actually prefer some genres over others?”

The \(\chi^2\) test compares the expected values (which are that the books are distributed evenly) to the actual values (what you actually observed). If they are close, the test suggests that the differences are most probably due to chance. If they are far, the test suggests that there is probably a pattern here: maybe some genres do dominate.

This is exactly what we will do with our data. The \(\chi^2\) test will look at the expected distribution of love words across time periods and compare it with the actual distribution.

I will spare you the details of the output (for those who are interested, the outcome of the test is in the Jupyter notebook in the GitHub repository). And the results are:

Era does matter for which love term gets used. But the effect size is small, which means that the patterns exist, but they’re subtle. This could be due to the dominance of hubb in every era. Now let’s do something more interesting. By looking at the residuals of the \(\chi^2\) test, we can see whether each love word is under or over-represented in each era¹¹.

Over and Under-Representation of Love Words by Era

This heatmap shows the representation of each word in different eras. The blue boxes are words that are underrepresented in this era. In other words, they appear much less than we expect them to. The red boxes, conversely, are over-represented words (they appear more than expected). For example, we can see that gharam was under-represented in the early eras, then became over-represented in the later eras, starting from the Ayyubid era. This heatmap can show us the patterns that were a bit too difficult to see in the previous figure. We can see the decrease in popularity of wudd as it advances through the eras and becomes more and more underrepresented. The light blue and red colors in the boxes of the hubb column indicate a very slight fluctuation of the representation of this word in different eras. In other words, it is fairly stable across time (compared, for example, to wudd, which fluctuates heavily).

Gender Influences

In our extracted dataset, we have 3,050 poets in total. Unsurprisingly, the poets are mostly male. Specifically, we have 2,937 males and 112 females. That’s 3.7% of the poets who are female! So, given this huge mismatch in the proportions of the genders, I wouldn’t draw any real conclusions from this kind of lopsided data, but we can still take a quick look.

	fitna	gharam	hawa	hubb	huyam	‘ishq	jawa	sababa	shaghaf	tawq	taym	wala’	walah	wudd
Female	0.1	4.5	14.5	54.6	2.5	9.2	0.2	2.7	3.5	1.0	0.6	1.3	1.3	4.1
Male	0.3	6.9	18.4	46.4	3.6	8.3	0.3	3.6	1.1	0.8	0.7	1.5	0.8	7.4

The table shows the percent share of love words by each gender in the dataset. Even though the female poets used hubb more than male poets, the overall trend is very similar. We see hubb taking the biggest share of love words, while hawa taking the second place, and ‘ishq in the third place. I don’t think there’s much to be said about the differences in usage between male and female poets, given the large disparity in the sample size, and that overall pattern doesn’t seem to deviate much between the two.

Stylistic Function

Now for the parts I’m most looking forward to: Exploring how exactly these words have been used. First, I wanted to see how often different words of love co-occur in the same poem.

Distribution of Distinct Love Words per Poem

Most of the poems include only one unique love word; around 13,500 poems include two unique words. Very few poems include more than 7 unique love words. The maximum love words in one poem was 10 words! And that happened in 3 poems! Now, let’s look at the average number of unique love words per poem in different eras.

Average Distinct Love Words per Poem by Era

There is a clear upward trend here despite the fluctuations. This might suggest that poets in later eras were more experimental in their use of love vocabulary, or that there is a gradual increase in lexical diversity and a stylistic shift toward richer rhetorical variation in the words of love, reaching a peak in the Ottoman period, where the average poem uses nearly two different love words!

So now we know it was not uncommon for distinct love words to appear together in the same poem. But is there a pattern to which words appeared together?

If you have been following along with the previous project, you might have guessed what I am about to do: A Network Analysis!

If you want to learn what a network analysis is or if you just want a refresher, I go into the details in Mapping the Mythos Part I. If you’re ready, let’s keep going. We can create a network made of co-occurrences of these love words within each poem, and then what we need to look at specifically is whether this network of words splits into separate communities. The communities would represent the words that most often appear together. So here we go!

We can see something very interesting. The network splits into two communities. The first community is made up of the words hubb, hawa, wudd, sababa, ‘ishq, gharam, while the rest of the words make up the second community. But look at the actual words in these communities. They correspond quite nicely to the two main polarities (positive and negative) in the semantic field of love, with one exception (gharam and shaghaf have switched teams!). This is quite interesting, and it does suggest one thing: as Arabic poetry has evolved over time, the poets have still preserved this distinction (albeit probably unconsciously) between the positive and negative words of love. This is just a suggestion, but what we can clearly see is that there is a tendency for poets to use the love words that have the same polarity in the same poem. The reasons for that could be an awareness of the semantic distinctions between these words, or it could be, as mentioned earlier, that as lexical usage evolved, writers and poets may have used the negative words of love unconsciously to express intense cases of love⁶. Can we know for sure? Probably not. Buuuuut, we can definitely explore this a bit further.

Sentiment Analysis

Luckily, we have predicted the sentiment of each poetry verse that contains a word of love. We can therefore analyze whether each of the love words has a tendency to appear in a verse with a specific sentiment. We can use the lift to compute the association between each love word and the sentiment classes.

The dreaded terminology alert: I will take a moment to explain “lift” as painlessly as possible. If you already know it, feel free to ignore this box.

Just think of lift as a way to see if two things happen together more often than you’d expect by chance. If lift is equal to 1, then these two things happen together just by coincidence, like two strangers wearing the same color shirt. Nothing special. If lift is greater than 1, then these things happen together more often than just by chance, like mornings and coffee! They are probably connected. If lift is less than 1, then these things happen less often together than pure chance, like cats and bathtubs! They probably actively avoid each other.

For the mathematically curious, I’m going to slide this in right here, but feel free to ignore:

\[\text{Lift}(A, B) = \frac{P(A \cap B)}{P(A) \cdot P(B)}\]

After calculating the lift for each love word with the three sentiment classes (neutral, positive, negative), we can construct a scale of “increasing” sentiment. The scale will start with the words that are most associated with neutral sentiment, then move into the words associated with positive sentiment, and finally, the words associated with negative sentiment. And we can order them based on their lift values (higher lift would correspond to a higher association with a sentiment, and therefore it would be further on the scale)

Love Words Along Polarity Path (Neutral → Positive → Negative)

This is Beautiful! This also corresponds well to the spectrum of the semantic field of love. There are two words here that are more associated with neutral sentiment (hawa and wudd), which are the first two words in the semantic field (the lighter words). Then there are three words associated with positive sentiment (‘ishq, hubb, and shaghaf) which are also part of the positive spectrum. Sababa is the only word that is part of the positive spectrum of love, which appears more associated with negative sentiment in poetic verses.

We’ve seen that not only do these words of love form two separate communities that almost fully correspond to the positive and negative sides of the spectrum of love (semantically), but also that they also exhibit distinct patterns of usage in poetry that correspond to the emotional sentiments of that spectrum. I think this does show that there is some evidence to suggest that poets are making conscious choices about the words they use based on their emotional connotations, at least it does not exclude the possibility of them being aware of these nuances, even in modern poetry.

Conclusion

we have a saying, يَحِقُّ لِلشَّاعِرِ مَا لَا يَحِقُّ لِغَيْرِهِ (yahiqqu lil-shaʿir ma la yahiqqu lighayrihi), which translates to The poet has the right to do what others do not. It highlights the unique creative liberties that poets can take in their work, allowing them to express emotions and ideas in ways that may not be permissible in other forms of discourse. I wanted to find out whether poets take advantage of the huge lexicon of love in order to make their verses fit in with the poetic rhythms more easily (regardless of whether this word fits the sentiment). In other words, do they cheat the system? Who’s going to know whether this or that word of love is more appropriate anyway, given that most modern Arabic readers are unaware of the differences between these words? And based on what we have seen from the data, I am inclined to say that they do not!

We’ve seen how the words they use cluster together, and how they are more likely to be used in specific sentiments that generally align with the classical semantic field of love. This suggests that poets are aware of the subtle differences between these words and they use them intentionally to convey specific emotional tones.

Well, this was fun! As usual, you can find all the data and code I used on GitHub. Feel free to explore the data yourself and prove me wrong!

This is a famous anecdote about Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri (973–1057) from “Al-Lta’if fi al-Lugha, Ahmad ibn Mustafa al-Bayeedi, Dar al-Fadila, Cairo”. In Arabic rhetoric, simply calling someone a dog was considered a low, unsophisticated insult. A refined speaker, especially in a gathering of scholars, could have chosen from many other, more eloquent expressions or metaphors. ↩
Larsen, David. Names of the Lion by Ibn Khālawayh. ↩
McDonald, M. V. (1978). Orally transmitted poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia and other pre-literate societies. Journal of Arabic Literature, 14-31. ↩
“Nomadic and Nostalgic: How Pre-Islamic Arabian Poetry Reflected and Reinforced the Contemporary Bedouin Lifestyle”. Retrospect Journal. February 16, 2025. ↩
“rawdat almuhibiyn wanuzhat almushtaqin”. ibn qiam aljawzia. Internet Archive ↩
Obiedat, A. Z. (2017). The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in the Ḥubb Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies. The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures: The Culture of Love and Languishing. Ur Alirea Korangy, Hanadi Al-Samman, and Michael C. London, New York: IB Tauris, 300-323. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Qarah, F. (2023). AraPoems: An Extensive Dataset of Arabic Poetry Associated with Verses, Rhymes, Meters, and More (Version V1) dataset. Harvard Dataverse. ↩
The eras are not perfectly chronological, as they represent not only different time periods, but also different geographical areas and political entities. The Arabic-speaking world was sometimes divided into more than one governance, and each developed its own literary traditions. Sometimes caliphates overlapped in time but differed in space, resulting in different “eras”. An example of this is the Abbasid caliphate from 750 to 1517 and a rival caliphate (the Fatimid) from 909 to 1117. The Abbasid caliphate was recognized in most of the Sunni regions, while the Fatimid caliphate was recognized in North Africa and Egypt. The poets are thus placed in an “era” based on the dominant caliphate in their region during their lifetime. And some “eras” are only literary eras, such as the “seasoned” and the “dual-eras” which represent poets that were active between two time periods. ↩
Poets who were active in both the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. ↩
Poets who were active in both the late Umayyad and the early Abbasid periods. ↩
Do you remember how the test compares the observed value to the expected value? Here, by measuring how far the word is from the expected value, we can quantify to what extent the word appeared more or less than expected. ↩

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Quantifying Love