Arabic dictionary
Dictionary Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane (d. 1876)
Entry وسل
1 وَسڤلَ see 5.
2 وَسَّلَ see 5.
5 تَوَسَّلَ بِالدَّلْوِ إِلَى المَآءِ [He sought to get at, or obtain, the water by means of the bucket]. (M in art. دلو.)
تَوَسَّلَ إِلَيْهِ بِكَذَا He sought to bring himself near to him, or to approach to him, to gain access to him, or to advance himself in his favour, by such a thing: (Msb, &c.:) so too ↓ وَسَّلَ; (S, K;) and ↓ وَسَلَ, aor. يَسِلُ. (Msb.) وَسِيلَةٌ A means of access to a thing; (IAth;) a means of becoming near to a thing: (IAth, Msb:) these are the primary significations: (IAth:) a means of becoming near to, or intimate with, or of ingratiating oneself with, another: (S:) honourable rank or station with a king: degree: affinity: (K:) a tie, or connexion: (TA:) it may be rendered a means of access, nearness, intimacy, ingratiating oneself, attachment, or connexion: and also, of attainment, or accomplishment.
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.
