Arabic dictionary
Dictionary Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane (d. 1876)
Entry قسطس
قُسْطَاسٌ and قِسْطَاسٌ A balance, or instrument for weighing: (S, Msb, K; and Bd in xvii. 37:) or the most even and most just kind thereof: or such as is just, of whatever kind it be: (K:) or i. q. قَبَّانٌ [a steelyard]: or, as Lth thinks, the iron of the قبّان: or i. q. شَاهِينٌ [the beam of a balance]: (TA:) or i. q. فَرَسْطُونٌ [an arabicized Persian word, signifying a public standard of weights or measures]: (Zj, TA:) also written قصطاس: (K:) said to be Arabic, from القِسْطُ, meaning “ justice: ” (Msb:) or a Greek word arabicized; (IDrd, Msb, K;) and its being so does not impugn the truth of the Kur-án's being [altogether] Arabic; for when a foreign word is used by the Arabs, and made by them conformable with their language in respect of desinential syntax and determinateness and indeterminateness and the like, it becomes Arabic: (Bd, ubi supra:) pl. قَسَاطِيسُ. (Msb.)
E.W. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (8 parts, London, 1863-93) is a major Arabic-English dictionary based on 112 sources, mostly medieval ones, along with al-Zabidi's Taj al-Aroos (also included in Lisaan.net). Lane died before he could finish the work, his great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole finished it, publishing Volumes VI, VII and VIII from 1877–1893 using Lane's incomplete notes. Lane-Pool's work is of lower quality than Lane's. The work of Reinhart Dozy (see below) was meant as a supplement to Lane's work that covers modern Arabic (Lane focused on classical Arabic only). The digital text for the Lexicon was sourced from Tufts University under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. We used a TXT version created by an internet user named Navid-ul-Islam. Lisaan.net's version of the Lane Lexicon corrects various errors from both the Persues project (such as erroneous transcriptions of the Persian letter ژ) and the TXT version. Lisaan.net's version also provides helpful automatic annotations on the various abbreviations used by Lane.
