Al-Farahidi, who was from the Basra School, chose an unusual arrangement that does not follow the alphabetical order familiar today as the standard dictionary format.
[6][10] The introduction to volume I contains the phonotactic rules of the Arabic root system, where consonants are classified according to properties of vocalisation, point of articulation, and common distributional characteristics.
Some few copies were made available for commercial sale,[15] although the work remained rare through much of the Middle Ages and despite being in circulation in al-Andalus in 914/915CE,[16] it was not until its discovery by Lebanese-Iraqi monk Anastas al-Karmali in 1914 that it was reintroduced into the West.
[18] The dictionary (alphabetically arranged) is available in Arabic in a four volume edition published in 2003 by Dar al-Kitab al-'Alamiyya (دار الكتب العلمية) and available online.
Ibn Duraid, who wrote the second comprehensive Arabic dictionary ever,[24] was accused by his contemporary Niftawayh of simply plagiarizing al-Farahidi's work.
[25][26] Al-Farahidi tried to rationalize the empirical practice of lexicography in al-Ayn, explicitly referring to the calculation of arrangements and combinations in order to exhaustively enumerate all words in Arabic.