qāmūs قاموس , pl. qawāmīsᵘ
1 ocean; 2 dictionary, lexicon – WehrCowan1976
▪ Via the form ʔuqyānūs ‘ocean’ borrowed from Grk Okeanós ‘Okeanos (god of the sea), Atlantic Ocean’, itself of unknown etymology – Rolland2014. – For more details see below, section DISC.
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▪ See also below, section DISC.
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▪ »The word ḳāmūs/ḳawmas, from the Greek Ωχεανός, appeared in Ar, at the latest at the time of the Prophet, with the meaning of ‘the bottom, the very deepest part of the sea’. Nevertheless, following Ptolemy, the Arab geographers borrowed the Grk word again, in the form Uḳiyānūs, and applied it to ‘the mass of water surrounding the earth’, more particularly the Atlantic Ocean, which was called Uḳiyānūs al-muḥīṭ, then more simply al-Ḳāmūs al-muḥīṭ. As this latter term was employed in a metaphorical sense by al-Fīrūzābādī as the title of his great dictionary, ḳāmūs eventually came to be a common noun denoting a dictionary, though it still carried some sense of ‘fullness, exhaustiveness’, incontrast to muʕdjam [↗muʕǧam], ‘lexicon’. This distinction, however, was neither general nor absolute, so that nowadays muʕdjam tends to be used in the same sense as ḳāmūs. In classical Arabic, the concept of ‘dictionary’ was not covered by any single term, each lexicographical work bearing its own title. A number of these titles included the word lugha [↗luġaẗ], ‘language’, and lexicography was called ʕilm al-lugha ‘the science of language’. Sometimes this was confused with ‘philology’, which today is called fiḳh al-lugha, an expression already employed in the Middle Ages by Ibn Fāris in the title of his celebrated Ṣāḥibī. The neologism muʕdjamiyyāt is now tending to gain currency« – J.A. Haywood, art. »Ḳāmūs«, in EI².
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See also ↗qamasa (↗QMS) and ↗qawmas (↗QWMS).
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