Ibn Manzur's objective in this project was to reïndex and reproduce the contents of previous works to facilitate readers' use of and access to them.

[1]Occupying 20 printed book volumes (in the most frequently cited edition), it is the best known dictionary of the Arabic language,[2] as well as one of the most comprehensive.

[3] It follows the Ṣiḥāḥ in the arrangement of the roots: The headwords are not arranged by the alphabetical order of the radicals as usually done today in the study of Semitic languages, but according to the last radical [4] - which makes finding rhyming endings significantly easier.

Murtaḍá al-Zabīdī corrected this in his Tāj al-ʿArūs, that itself goes back to the Lisān.

The Lisān, according to Ignatius d'Ohsson, was already printed in the 18th century in Istanbul,[5] thus fairly early for the Islamic world.