Doha, November 02 (QNA) - The Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language on Monday launched its new official smartphone application on Apple's App Store and Google Play, in a move to broaden access to its vast linguistic resources for researchers, writers and other users across the Arab world and beyond.

The application, in its newly redesigned form, reflects the latest updates to the dictionary's online portal, which were introduced alongside a ceremony marking the project's completion last year. The upgrades make the portal's resources more readily accessible to smartphone users across different operating systems.

It enables users to search approximately 300,000 dictionary entries, 10,000 roots and 10,000 bibliographical sources, as well as explore the linguistic contexts of a corpus containing nearly one billion words. Users can also benefit from the full range of enhancements and services added to the portal over the past year, chiefly its automated pronunciation service, introduced in June.

In addition, the application allows users to create personal accounts and sign in, as they can on the online portal, unlocking specialized services such as saving searches and their results, submitting comments and corrections on dictionary entries to the scientific team, and contributing to the project by proposing words, meanings or textual citations that may not yet appear in its entries. Users can also browse the "Word of the Day" feature and access the dictionary's social media accounts.

Executive Director of the Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language Dr. Mohammed Al Obaidi said the new application builds on an epochal vision for the dictionary that took shape during its early founding stages, clarifying that the decision to go online stemmed from an ambition to navigate the constraints of time and place, making it accessible to anyone seeking to benefit from it, wherever they may be.

Al Obaidi emphasized that the dictionary's value lies not merely in its unprecedented breadth, precision and reliability, but equally in making its content accessible to Arabic speakers through modern, user-friendly means. He said efforts to expand its user base through various search engines and the application are instrumental to fulfilling its overarching objective: serving as a transformative intellectual project for the Arab world as a whole.

The dictionary's team is now laying the groundwork for a new phase focused on capitalizing on the unparalleled linguistic wealth of what is the largest historical dictionary of the Arabic language. Its completion was announced on Dec. 22, 2025, following its official launch in May 2013 under the supervision of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies.

The project took more than 12 years to complete and involved over 500 researchers from across the Arab world.

The dictionary's influence has extended well beyond the Arab world, with a growing number of Western universities recommending it as a research resource for students and adding it to their electronic library collections.

Cornell University in the United States and the University of British Columbia in Canada have both incorporated it into their digital libraries under the hierarchical classification headings of Near Eastern Studies, Arabic Literature, and Dictionaries, Thesauruses and Abbreviations. (QNA)