This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
خُنْفَسَآءُ خنفسآء (S, Msb, K) [in two copies of the S, in which it is without the article, written without tenween, but in the Msb and K it has the article prefixed, and is therefore necessarily without tenween,] and خُنْفُسَآء, (Msb, TA,) which is more common, (Msb,) [but this I doubt, for I have found it nowhere else,] and ↓ خُنْفَسٌ (S, K) and خُنْفُسٌ (TA) and خِنْفِسٌ, (K,) which last is of the dial. of the people of El-Basrah, (TA,) and خُنْفُسَةٌ and خُنْفُسَةٌ, (K,) [The black beetle: or a certain species thereof:] a well-known creeping thing; (Msb;) a certain insect, (S, K,) black, (K,) of fetid odour, smaller than the جُعَل, found in the bottoms of walls: (TA:) the first and second of these words are both applied to the male and the female: (Msb:) or خُنْفَسٌ is applied to the male, (AA, Msb,) by some of the Arabs, (Msb,) and is syn. with عُنْظَبٌ and حُنْظَبٌ, (AA, TA,) and خُنْفُسٌ is not disallowable, being agree- able with analogy: (Msb:) and خُنْفَسَاءَةٌ is applied to the female, [which, if correct, shows خنفسآء to be with tenween,] and so is خُنْفَسَةٌ: (S:) or خنفساءة, with ة, is not allowable; [and if so, خنفسآء is without tenween;] (As, TA;) and خنفسة is [not applied to the female, but] used by the Benoo-Asad for خنفسآء, as though they made the ة a substitute for the ا: (Msb:) [and this seems to indicate that the ا is a fem. ا, grammatically speaking, and that the word is therefore without tenween:] the pl. is خَنَافِسُ. (Msb.) One says, هُوَ أَلَحُّ مِنَ الخُنْفَسَآءِ [He is more persevering than the black beetle]: because it returns to thee as often as thou throwest it away. (TA.) [Accord. to the K, the ن in the words of this art. is radical; but accord. to the S and Msb, augmentative.]
An Arabic-English Lexicon. London. Williams and Norgate. 1863.
The U.S. Department of Education, The Max Planck Society provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.
hide
Dictionary Entry Lookup
Use this tool to search for dictionary entries in all lexica.
