Remembering the Architect of Words: The Legacy of Dr. Abdul Ghani Abu Al-Azm

If you have ever found yourself stuck on a difficult Arabic text or struggling with a translation, chances are you opened your browser, typed the word into the famous online database almaany.com , and sighed in relief when a clear, modern definition appeared.

Many entries on Almaany draw on Muʿjam al-Ghanī (معجم الغني) among other dictionaries, making this work a daily digital lifeline for students and scholars alike. Yet, what many who rely on this tool might not realize is that behind its pages lies the lifelong dedication of a single, extraordinary scholar.

In March 2026, Moroccan media reported the passing of that very scholar: the linguist and lexicographer Dr. Abdul Ghani Abu Al-Azm (الدكتور عبد الغني أبو العزم), who was born on April 12, 1942, and died on March 18, 2026, aged 83.

He left behind one of the most ambitious modern Arabic dictionaries, Al-Ghani Al-Zaher (معجم الغني الزاهر).

The expanded four-volume edition is widely regarded as a major attempt to bridge classical Arabic lexicography with the vocabulary of contemporary life.

Let’s face a hard truth: the creators and maintainers of dictionaries are the unsung heroes of our modern world. They rarely get the spotlight, yet without them, the very foundation of our communication crumbles. Every spell-checker, every translation app, and every single AI language model currently dazzling the tech world relies entirely on the painstaking, decades-long labor of lexicographers. Without scholars feeding databases with contemporary usages and newly minted words, the artificial intelligence we rely on would quickly dry up, losing its grasp on how Arabic is actually spoken and written today.

The Arabic literary and academic world responded to his passing with an outpouring of grief. In Arabic, نَعْي (naʿy) refers to an obituary or formal death notice, while مَرْثِيَّة (marthiya, pl. مَرَاثِي) is an elegy or lament, often highly literary.

The tributes to Dr. Abu Al-Azm showed the profound, almost devastating poetic beauty for which Arabic elegies are known

Obituaries in the press

Reading through the various obituaries published across the Arab world, I was struck by how moving the tributes were. It is not always easy to translate the inner, deep weight and the sheer emotional gravity of these Arabic eulogies into English, but they deserve to be shared.

Please note that the translations below are somewhat free rather than strictly literal.

Writing for the Moroccan news outlet Hespress (➤ article), writer Abdul Fattah Lahjmari (عبد الفتاح لحجمري) expressed the gravity of this loss beautifully:

When certain scholars depart, a subtle fracture echoes across the horizons — a quiet break in the very majesty of meaning, as if language itself had closed its notebooks for a moment and gazed into the absence in disbelief.

حِينَ يَرْحَلُ بَعْضُ العُلَمَاءِ يُسْمَعُ فِي الْأَرْجَاءِ انْكِسَارٌ خَفِيٌّ فِي هَيْبَةِ الْمَعْنَى، كَأَنَّ اللُّغَةَ نَفْسَهَا قَدْ أَطْبَقَتْ دَفَاتِرَهَا قَلِيلاً، وَحَدَّقَتْ فِي الْغِيَابِ غَيْرَ مُصَدِّقَةٍ.

In the same tribute, Lahjmari described the lexicographer’s deep, almost spiritual connection to the Arabic language:

He did not live next to the language, but rather lived inside it, residing among its vocabulary, knowing its hidden entrances and being gentle with its shadows.

لَمْ يَعِشْ بِجِوَارِ اللُّغَةِ، وَإِنَّمَا عَاشَ فِيهَا، وَأَقَامَ بَيْنَ مُفْرَدَاتِهَا، يَعْرِفُ مَدَاخِلَهَا الْخَفِيَّةَ، وَيَحْنُو عَلَى ظِلَالِهَا.

He further reflected on how Dr. Abdul Ghani’s work transcended mere academic writing, elevating it to an act of cultural preservation:

He was among those who do not write with ink alone, but with the patience the mind has stored and the loyalty the heart has kept, building from the dictionary a second homeland whose borders never collapse and whose lamps never go out.

كَانَ مِنْ أُولَئِكَ الَّذِينَ لَا يَكْتُبُونَ بِالْحِبْرِ وَحْدَهُ، وَإِنَّمَا يَكْتُبُونَ بِمَا يَخْتَزِنُ الْعَقْلُ مِنْ صَبْرٍ، وَمَا يَخْتَزِنُ الْقَلْبُ مِنْ وَفَاءٍ… وَيُشَيِّدُونَ مِنَ الْمُعْجَمِ وَطَناً ثَانِياً لَا تَسْقُطُ حُدُودُهُ وَلَا تَنْطَفِئُ قَنَادِيلُهُ.

The Moroccan platform The Voice (صوت المغرب) perfectly summarized how he viewed language not merely as a subject, but as a living struggle (➤ article):

ʿAbd al-Ghanī Abū al-ʿAzm was not merely a university professor delivering language lessons, nor a lexicographer working silently between the covers of dictionaries. He was one of those who made of language a life’s project and of the word an intellectual and cultural battleground.

عَبْدُ الْغَنِي أَبُو الْعَزْمِ لَمْ يَكُنْ مُجَرَّدَ أُسْتَاذٍ جَامِعِيٍّ يُلَقِّنُ دُرُوسَ اللُّغَةِ، وَلَا مُعْجَمِيّاً يَشْتَغِلُ فِي صَمْتٍ بَيْنَ دَفَّاتِ الْقَوَامِيسِ، كَانَ وَاحِداً مِنْ أُولَئِكَ الَّذِينَ جَعَلُوا مِنَ اللُّغَةِ مَشْرُوعَ حَيَاةٍ، وَمِنَ الْكَلِمَةِ مَعْرَكَةً فِكْرِيَّةً وَثَقَافِيَّةً.

Meanwhile, Al-Omk (العمق المغربي) – an independent Moroccan online newspaper based in Rabat, Morocco -referred to him using a brilliant metaphor for his craft (➤ article):

Morocco has lost a major linguistic authority who spent decades of his life serving the Arabic language and bringing it closer to younger generations, for the late scholar was a “sculptor of words” and a founder of a modern lexicographical school.

يَكُونُ الْمَغْرِبُ قَدْ فَقَدَ مَرْجِعاً لُغَوِيّاً أَفْنَى عُقُوداً مِنْ عُمْرِهِ فِي خِدْمَةِ اللُّغَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّةِ وَتَقْرِيبِهَا مِنَ الْأَجْيَالِ الصَّاعِدَةِ، حَيْثُ كَانَ الرَّاحِلُ “نَحَّاتاً لِلْكَلِمَاتِ” وَمُؤَسِّساً لِمَدْرَسَةٍ مُعْجَمِيَّةٍ حَدِيثَةٍ.

And his long-time friend and comrade, Youssef Ghouirgate (يوسف اغويرگات), penned a moving farewell that captured the multifaceted nature of the man (➤ article):

Over the course of his career, he brought together what seldom meets in anyone else: the rigor of a thinker, the depth of a fighter, and the spirit of a poet.

وَقَدْ جَمَعَ فِي مَسَارِهِ مَا قَلَّمَا يَجْتَمِعُ عِنْدَ غَيْرِهِ: صَرَامَةُ الْمُفَكِّرِ، وَعُمْقُ الْمُنَاضِلِ، وَرُوحُ الشَّاعِرِ.

A Life Dedicated to the Word

Born in the vibrant city of Marrakech in 1941, Abdul Ghani Abu Al-Azm was a man whose intellect could not be confined to a single discipline.

His academic journey took him to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied Islamic Thought, before returning to Morocco to earn a State Doctorate in Lexicography from Hassan II University in Casablanca. There, he served as a university professor and helped shape generations of researchers, playing a founding role in the Research and Training Unit in Arabic Language Sciences and Lexicography.

But Abu Al-Azm was not just an academic in an ivory tower. He was an active, passionate participant in Morocco’s complex political and cultural history. During the politically fraught 1960s and 70s, he is reported to have been involved in leftist political activism, including the “23 March” movement (حركة 23 مارس).

He was also a gifted storyteller and translator. He translated a number of intellectual and historical works into Arabic. He documented his own life, political struggles, and experiences of exile in a series of autobiographical novels that are well regarded in Moroccan literary circles, including Al-Darih (الضريح – The Shrine, 1994) and Al-Darih Al-Akhar (الضريح الآخر – The Other Shrine), the latter of which won the Morocco Book Award in 1996.

He even authored a poetry collection reflecting on his time in exile, fittingly titled Hakadha Haddathani Al-Manfa (هكذا حدثني المنفى – Thus Exile Spoke to Me).

Al-Ghani Al-Zaher Dictionary

While his literary and political contributions were vast, Dr. Abu Al-Azm’s most important work is his dictionary, Muʿjam al-Ghani (معجم الغني), which culminated in the definitive edition al-Ghani al-Zaher (معجم الغني الزاهر).

This Arabic-Arabic dictionary stands as a masterpiece of modern lexicography. Comprehensive contemporary Arabic dictionaries are exceedingly rare; typically, a lexicon of this scale is a multi-decade endeavor undertaken by entire state-sponsored language academies and committees of scholars.

Yet, Dr. Abu Al-Azm served as the primary author and architect of this Herculean task. After publishing initial editions in the early 2000s, he spent the ensuing years relentlessly expanding the work. The definitive four-volume edition, published with the support of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF), was later showcased at major events like the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, where it was widely celebrated for filling a ‘great knowledge gap in contemporary Arabic.’

Spanning four massive volumes, what makes Al-Ghani truly significant is its structure and scope:

1. Bridging the Ancient and the Modern: The dictionary brings together classical Arabic vocabulary and contemporary language from literature, media, and modern sciences, placing words in meaningful and practical contexts. As noted in Arabic scholarship, it reflects the transformations of the living language (تحولات اللغة الحية), demonstrating that Arabic is a dynamic and evolving system.
2. Alphabetical (word-based) order (ترتيب ألفبائي هجائي): Unlike classical root-based dictionaries such as Lisan al-Arab (لسان العرب), Al-Ghani organizes entries according to their full written form. This allows users to look up words like اِسْتَخْرَجَ directly under “ا”, without needing to reduce them to their three-letter root.
3. Lexical awareness: The dictionary frequently notes whether terms are Arabized (الْمُعَرَّب) or loanwords (الدَّخِيل), highlighting the diverse historical layers of the Arabic lexicon.

How to Access the Dictionary Al-Ghani

If you want to explore this monumental work:

• Online: The dictionary’s entries are integrated into the famous online Arabic database, Al-Maany (almaany.com), making it accessible for quick searches alongside other lexicons.
• Digital copies or scans of the volumes can be found on sites like shamela.org, but always make sure the download is legal and respects copyright.
• Offline/Print: You can order the physical edition from most bookstores. For example, it is available at neelwafurat.com.

Dr. Abdul Ghani Abu Al-Azm spent his life mapping the Arabic language so that the rest of us could navigate it without getting lost. He dedicated his existence to ensuring the language he loved remained accessible, functional, and alive for future generations.

As fellow researcher Saeed Yaqteen (سعيد يقطين) wrote in Al‑Ittihad Al‑Ishtiraki (الاتحاد الاشتراكي) – a major Moroccan center‑left daily newspaper (xxx article):

Parting is a clamor. Yet your presence remains forever in memory and in the heart. For it is people like you whose loss is hardest to bear.

الْفِرَاقُ صَخَبٌ. لَكِنْ وُجُودُكَ يَظَلُّ أَبَداً فِي الذَّاكِرَةِ وَالْوِجْدَانِ. فَمِثْلُكَ مَنْ يَعِزُّ عَلَيْهِمْ فِرَاقُهُمْ.

His physical presence is gone, but every time we look up a word, his legacy lives on in the language he so devotedly served.