Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Etymology obscure, perh. either *‘way of twisting ropes’ (↗³salab ‘ropes, hawsers’) or *‘way of (cleverly) getting away with s.th.’ (↗salaba ‘to take away, steal, wrest, snatch’). See below, section DISC.
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hist

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cogn

▪ No obvious cognates.
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disc

▪ The etymology of ʔuslūb ‘method, way, manner, mode, style’ is rather unclear. As there are no obvious foreign terms on which the word could have been modelled, it seems to be genuine Ar. Accord. to Barth1894: 225, the morphological pattern ʔuFʕūL on which ʔuslūb is formed, has almost no parallels outside Ar either.
▪ In ClassAr dictionaries, ʔuslūb is attested also with several other meanings. Most lexica have ‘road’ as a more concrete value than the modern abstract ‘method, mode, style’. Both Lane iv 1872 and BadawiAbdelHaleem2008 also register the meaning ^†‘row of palm-trees’ which Lane thinks »is app[arently] the primary signification, as seems to be indicated by its occupying the first place in the TA [Tāǧ al-ʕArūs]«. Based on this remark, one may feel tempted to assume a development along the line *‘row of palm-trees > row > road, way > way of doing things, method’. Such a development is not attested, however, nor would the assumption solve the question of the origin of the value ‘row of palm-trees’.
▪ Apart from the above values, there are at least five others to be found in the ClassAr lexica, none of them however providing unambiguous hints as to the word’s etymology. Accord. to DHDA, ʔuslūb is first attested (in a Huḏaylī poem, dated pre-581 CE) as ‘type of tree, growing symmetrically and becoming high, among the plants that give the best material for twisting ropes’. Here, ʔuslūb seems to be close in meaning, or even identical with, the type of plant (a hyacinth, sansiveria, or cotton-thistle, East African wild sisal) mentioned s.v. ↗³salab ‘ropes, hawsers’. Based on this evidence, a hypothetical line of semantic development could be *‘sansiveria type of plant > fibres of this plant > to twist ropes/hawsers from these fibres > way of twisting ropes/hawsers > way, method’, hence also ‘literary style’, as *‘way of “twisting” words/sentences’. Not unconceivable. – Lane iv 1872 registered also a f. var.,ʔuslūbaẗ , meaning ‘a certain game of the Arabs of the desert, or some action that they perform among them; one says bayna-hum ʔuslūbaẗ “among them is a performance of what is termed ʔuslūbaẗ”’. As the type of game or performance is not specified, no conclusions can be drawn from this data either. However, one could imagine that the activity had s.th. to do with ↗salaba ‘to take away, steal, wrest, snatch, rob, strip, etc.’, in which case ʔuslūb(aẗ) would originally mean the methods of *‘(playfully) snatching s.th. from an opponent, trying to strip the opponent of s.th. (arms, clothing, etc.)’. Not unconceivable either, esp. in light of the fact that some SLB items show a connection to the idea of legerity, quickness, nimbleness, for instance, ^†¹salib ‘light, active, quick’. – Yet another older/extinct meaning of ʔuslūb is (BK1860) ‘toute la longueur du nez’; to this, we should perh. put (due to its length or being stretched out?) the ‘neck of the lion (Lane iv 1872) | cou du lion (BK1860)’. If the modern ʔuslūb should be connected to this notion of ‘length, extension’, the explanation would be in line with Gabal2012: 1079 who interprets ʔuslūb as »any extended way/road’ (kull ṭarīq mumtadd), in this way building a bridge to the above-mentioned ‘row of palm-trees’. – Lane iv 1872 has also ‘aperture of a watering-trough\tank through which the water flows’, but this seems to be a contamination (or misreading?) from ↗sallaẗ, now mostly ‘basket’, but also attested as ‘(Hava1899:) chink in a tank, (Lane iv 1872:) fault\defect in a watering-trough or in a jar, breach, fissures in the ground that steal the water’.
▪ In all the above cases, a semantic relation between modern ʔuslūb ‘method, way, manner, mode, style’ and the most productive general root meaning *‘to draw out, take away, deprive s.o. of s.th.’ (see ↗SLB and ↗salaba) can only be established with big caveats.
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west

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deriv

►ʔuslūb kitābī, n., literary style

For other meanings attached to the root, cf. ↗salaba, ↗saliba, ↗salbī, ↗²salab, and ↗EgAr ³salab, as well as, for the overall picture, root entry ↗√SLB.

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