▪ ʕYN_1 ‘eye’ ↗ʕayn ▪ ʕYN_2 ‘…’ ↗… ▪ ʕYN_3 ‘fountain, clear flowing water’ ↗maʕīn♦ Semantic value spectrum in ClassAr (acc. to BAH2008): ‘eye, eyesight, to see, to have beautiful eyes, to injure the eye, to give the evil eye, to spy, to ascertain, notables; water spring; group of brothers’
▪ Jeffery1938: »It occurs only in early and middle Meccan passages. / The philologers were uncertain whether it was a form faʕīl from ↗maʕana ‘to flow’, or connected with ↗māʕūn, or from ↗ʕāna, so called because of its clearness, cf. Zam. on xxiii, 52, and LA, xvii, 179, 298. / The word ʕyn for a ‘spring of water’ is of course comSem, but Fraenkel, Fremdw, 281, noted that the Qurʔānic maʕīn is the Hbr maʕyān, Syr mʕīnā = Grk ‘pēgḗ’, commonly used for ‘spring, bubbling fountain’. From one of these sources, probably from the Syr, it came into Ar.«