This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Hassan Hamze is about the birth of the Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, a birth linked to that of other linguistic and religious disciplines in a flourishing society that would inherit the sciences of the ancients before developing and transmitting them to modern Western civilization. The small, utilitarian lexicons quickly gave way to the great dictionary al-ʿAyn, which established the Arabic lexicographical tradition. The bilingual dictionary did not appear until much later, first with the languages of the Arab-Muslim world, then with Latin in Andalusia after the eleventh century, and with other languages, particularly Western ones, in the modern era. Its role today is significant in terminological creation. The Arabic dictionary is, above all, a dictionary of word families classified by consonantal roots. The classification by words, which appeared very early in specialized dictionaries, did not appear in the general dictionary until the mid twentieth century, under the influence of the European dictionary, due to the issues posed by the status of short vowels and broken plurals.