ليف

Arabic

Alternative forms

Etymology

From the root ل ف ف (l-f-f) meaning “to fold up or roll up in”, “to wrap or envelop”, “an envelope of a plant, a pericarp or glume”.

Also suspicious of Aramaic substrate however, as Classical Syriac ܠܘܦܐ (lawpā, lūpā) means “parietary” and “arum” or “edder-wort”, deriving well from ܠܴܦ (lāp̄, to weave together, to conjoin), and the form لُوف (lūf) is stronger in the dialects with the additional meaning of “arum”, which is mentioned for Syriac already in the 1st-century Dioskurides interpolations 2:167. Compare the Aramaic-borrowed كَافُور (kāfūr, bract of the inflorescence of the date palm) and خُوص (ḵūṣ, frond or leaves of the palm tree) from similar semantic domain.

Noun

لِيف • (līf) m (collective, singulative لِيفَة f (līfa), plural أَلْيَاف (ʔalyāf))

  1. fibres, spongy interior of a plant
  2. a handheld sponge
  3. Luffa (genus and species)
  4. fibres, tubular cells of bodily tissue
    أَلْيَاف الصَّدْرʔalyāf aṣ-ṣadrmuscle fibres of the thorax

Declension

Descendants

  • Turkish: lif

Verb

لَيَّفَ • (layyafa) II, non-past يُلَيِّفُ‎ (yulayyifu)

  1. to have much fibre
  2. to rub with fibre or a sponge

Conjugation

References

  • lwp”, in The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1986–
  • Freytag, Georg (1837) “ليف”, in Lexicon arabico-latinum praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzabadiique et aliorum Arabum operibus adhibitis Golii quoque et aliorum libris confectum (in Latin), volume 4, Halle: C. A. Schwetschke, page 141
  • Wehr, Hans with Kropfitsch, Lorenz (1985) “ليف”, in Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (in German), 5th edition, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, published 2011, →ISBN, page 1177
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