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Arab

adjectivenounproper nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈaɹəb//
  • Australia//ˈæɹəb//
  • Scotland//ˈaɾəb//
  • //ˈæɹəb//
  • //ˈɛɹəb//

Of or pertaining to Arabs and their nations.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or pertaining to Arabs and their nations.

    The dispatches […] also exposed the blatant discrepancy between the west's professed values and actual foreign policies. Having lectured the Arab world about democracy for years, its collusion in suppressing freedom was undeniable as protesters were met by weaponry and tear gas made in the west, employed by a military trained by westerners.

Etymology

Borrowed from Arabic عَرَب (ʕarab, “Arabs”) or back-formation from Arabic.

noun

  1. 1

    A member of the Semitic ethnic group native to the Arabian Peninsula.

  2. 2

    A person from the Middle East and North Africa, whose mother tongue is Arabic.

    This backlash also fails to take into account that Israel, for all its faults, is a multicultural society where almost half of graduating doctors today are Arabs or Druze.

  3. 3

    An Arabian horse.

    Having taken a very early breakfast, I mounted about eight o'clock my grey Arab, and without anything occurring worthy of note, killed the first three boars in the space of an hour, […]

  4. 4

    archaicA street Arab.

    a. 1892, Charles Spurgeon, a sermon You Christian people often see the little gutter children — the poor little arabs in the street — and you feel much pity for them, as well you may.

    The other day I heard you complaining of the nuisance that small ragged street-boys are to you whenever you go out. […] You wished that some one would do something to clear away these little Arabs, as you are pleased to call them, so that a fine old English gentleman—as you are pleased to think yourself—might take his exercise in peace.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A city in Marshall County, Alabama, United States.

  2. 2

    datedThe Arabic language.

    Tarzan, who, by this time, with the assistance of Abdul, had picked up quite a smattering of Arab, questioned one of the younger men who had accompanied the sheik while the latter paid his respects to Captain Gerard.

Forms

plural
Arabs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).