Point Taken

A spelling error related to dry cleaning was found in an Arabic text in a hotel in Oman: الباشف instead of the correct spelling الناشف.

Laundry and drycleaning bag from Golden Tulip with text in English and Arabic, including instructions to use a laundry list and spaces to fill in name and room number.

Diagnosis: Spelling

The text was spotted on a laundry bag in a hotel in Oman. In Arabic, the position of the dot is particularly important for the letters ن and ب when they are connected to other letters.

Arabic text in question

على الباشف

Arabic text as it should be

عَلَى النَّاشِفِ

Note: You don’t use diacritics (تشكيل) in everyday Arabic. We use them here to clearly explain the grammar, spelling and meaning of words. To avoid confusion, we generally ignore auxiliary vowels that are necessary for pronunciation to avoid consonant clusters.

Analysis

The phrase غسيل وتنظيف على الناشف means Laundry & Dry Cleaning. The term على الناشف signifies by the dry method or dry-cleaned, aligning with the common colloquial Arabic expression على الناشف used for dry cleaning.

We tried to find an Arabic root containing the letter combination ب-ش-ف, but we couldn’t find anything in any of the old classical dictionaries. This is surprising, given that the letter combination wouldn’t suggest that.

The word ناشِفٌ (dry; crude) is the active participle (اِسْمُ الْفاعِلِ) of the I-verb نَشِفَ – يَنْشَفُ which means to dry up. In general, the core meaning of the root ن-ش-ف relates to dryness or the absorption of moisture.

Dry-clean (clothes, a dress) in Modern Standard Arabic is نَظَّفَ تَنْظِيفًا جافًّا