1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fairūzābādī
FAIRŪZĀBĀDĪ [Ābū–ṭ–Ṭāhir ibn Ibrahīm Majd ud-Dīn ul-Fairūzābādī] (1329–1414), Arabian lexicographer, was born at Kārazīn near Shiraz. His student days were spent in Shiraz, Wāsiṭ, Bagdad and Damascus. He taught for ten years in Jerusalem, and afterwards travelled in western Asia and Egypt. In 1368 he settled in Mecca, where he remained for fifteen years. He next visited India and spent some time in Delhi, then remained in Mecca another ten years. The following three years were spent in Bagdad, in Shiraz (where he was received by Timur), and in Ta’iz. In 1395 he was appointed chief cadi (qadi) of Yemen, married a daughter of the sultan, and died at Zabīd in 1414. During this last period of his life he converted his house at Mecca into a school of Mālikite law and established three teachers in it. He wrote a huge lexicographical work of 60 or 100 volumes uniting the dictionaries of Ibn Sīda, a Spanish philologist (d. 1066), and of Sajānī (d. 1252). A digest of or an extract from this last work is his famous dictionary al-Qāmūs (“the Ocean”), which has been published in Egypt, Constantinople and India, has been translated into Turkish and Persian, and has itself been the basis of several later dictionaries. (G. W. T.)