[1] The dictionary is based on attestations in written Arabic taken from modern literature, newspapers, and state documents.

The Arabic-German dictionary project was funded by the Nazi government, which intended to use it to translate Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic.

A group of scholars including Werner Caskel, Hans Kindermann, Hedwig Klein, Kurt Munzel, Annemarie Schimmel, Richard Schmidt, Wolfram von Soden, Muhammad Safti, Tahir Khemiri, Anton Spitaler, Andreas Jacobi, and Heinrich Becker contributed to the project.

[1] The primary source material included selected works of modern Arabic literature, the authors Taha Hussein, Mohammed Hussein Heikal, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mahmud Taymur, Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, Kahlil Gibran, and Ameen Rihani.

[1] Secondary sources included Léon Bercher's [fr] Lexique arabe-français (1938) based on Tunisian press and in supplement to Jean-Baptiste Belot's [ar] Vocabulaire arabe-français, Georges-Séraphin Colin's Pour lire la presse arabe (1937), Elias A. Elias' Modern Dictionary Arabic-English (1929), and the glossary of C.V. Ode-Vassilieva's Modern Arabic Chrestomathy (1929).

[1] Secondary source material considered in preparing the Supplement included later editions of Bercher and Elias and David Neustadt and Pessar Schusser's [he] Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary (Millón 'Arabi-' Ibri [he], 1947), Charles Pellat's L'arabe vivant (1952), and C.K.

The publication of the English edition was financed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Arabian-American Oil Company, and Cornell University.

Harrassowitz published an improved English translation of the 4th edition of the Arabic-German dictionary with over 13,000 additional entries, approx.

[9] It was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, New York, and is usually available in the United States as a compact "student" paperback[10] (ISBN 0-87950-003-4).

The 5th edition available in German, published by Harrassowitz's publishing house in 1985, also in the city of Wiesbaden, under the title Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart: Arabisch–Deutsch, unter Mitwirkung von Lorenz Kropfitsch neu bearbeitet und erweitert (ISBN 3-447-01998-0).

[11] The Arabist and lexicographer Dr. Lorenz Kropfitsch, who taught Arabic at the FTSK Germersheim for decades, passed away on January 5, 2020 at the age of 73.

For example, اكل (transliterated akala, "to eat", from the root أ ك ل ʼ k l), which has an initial hamzat al-qaṭʽ, and ابن (ibn "son", from the root ب ن b-n), which does not have an initial hamzat al-qaṭʽ, are both written without a hamza represented in either the Arabic or the transliteration.