موسTo shave; Ibn Fāris also uses the entry to discuss the non-derivational nisba formed from … (root mws)

The lexicographers in chronological order, from al-Khalīl to Lane.

Al-Khalīl treats mūsā (the razor) as the base term and reports a folk etymology of the prophet's name Mūsā as mā (water) + shajar/sā (tree), evoking the ark resting among trees in the water — an etymology, not a derivation from the shaving-verb. Al-Jawharī does not gloss the razor sense at all here; instead he records the grammarians' dispute over the morphological pattern of the proper name Mūsā — Kisāʾī takes it as faʿlā, Abū ʿAmr b. al-ʿAlāʾ as mafʿal — showing the name was already felt to be irregular or opaque within the triliteral system. Ibn Fāris's maqāyīs gives al-maws as 'shaving the head' and then, rather than deriving Mūsā from it, discusses the nisba Mūsawī/ʿĪsawī, following Kisāʾī in treating the yāʾ in both proper names as an augment (zāʾida) for the purpose of nisba, not a root radical. Ibn Manẓūr compiles the same material plus a rare pastoral sense (al-mawsu as a herdsman drawing stallion-fluid from a mare's womb) attributed only to al-Layth and doubted by al-Azharī, alongside the same morphological debate over the razor-noun mūsā. Lane confirms māsa/yamūsu 'he shaved,' while noting al-Ṣaghānī questioned its soundness and Ibn Fāris himself doubted it — the root's core sense is thus attested but treated with some classical unease.

What the theorists of sound symbolism would say of these letters. Speculative by nature.

In the given Akbarian letter-correspondences, mīm stands for the human being (or, per al-Dabbāgh, for all created beings generally), wāw for the fixing of ranks, stations, and waystations (or, per al-Dabbāgh, for the intertwined things within the human being, such as veins and fingers), and sīn for what appears in water (or, per al-Dabbāgh, for the comely thing whose nature is delicacy). Read impressionistically against mūsā/mawsu, these values sit oddly with 'shaving' but suggestively with the proper name's own folk-etymology (water, delicacy, the human form drawn from water in al-Khalīl's account of the ark). This remains speculative letter-symbolism; there is no demonstrated linguistic mechanism connecting these letter-values to the historical semantics of the root, and mainstream philology does not treat such correspondences as explanatory.

The two-letter nucleus (Ibn Fāris's own chapters) and the permutations of the letters (Ibn Jinnī).

Ibn Fāris's chapter neighbors show m-w-th as 'to steep/soften something in water,' m-w-j as agitation/undulation (the sea's mawj), and m-w-r as back-and-forth motion or oscillation (of blood, of anything unsettled) — a cluster loosely evoking fluid or unsettled movement, against which m-w-s's 'shaving' sits somewhat apart, closer instead to physical removal than to motion. The permutation table is more striking: while m-w-s itself and its reverse m-s-w are unattested as independent roots, the anagram w-s-m yields 'to mark, brand' (with al-wasmī, the season's first rain, named for how it 'marks' the earth), s-m-w yields 'height, elevation' (sumūw, by far the most frequent of the group), and s-w-m yields 'to seek out, to price, to pasture' (sawm). Ibn Jinnī's greater-derivation method would note that three of the six permutations of these three letters are independently live roots with distinct but not unrelated semantic fields (marking, elevating, pricing/seeking) — a suggestive constellation, offered here as juxtaposition rather than as an etymological claim binding mūsā to any of them.

Cognates in the sister languages, and whether the word was borrowed.

The Arabic verbal root m-w-s ('to shave') has no confident external Semitic cognate in the sources available and appears to be a native Arabic formation, independent of the proper name Mūsā. The name Mūsā (Moses) itself, however, is a separate matter: it is the Arabic reflex of Hebrew Mōšeh, which most Semitists and Egyptologists trace ultimately to Egyptian msy/mss 'child, born of' (as in Ra-messes), entering Arabic as an unanalyzable proper name via the biblical/Qur'anic tradition rather than through the shaving-root. The coincidence in form between the name and the native root m-w-s is almost certainly what drove al-Khalīl's water-and-tree folk etymology and the grammarians' unease (recorded by al-Jawharī and Ibn Fāris) over whether the name's pattern is faʿlā or mafʿal — signs that the classical philologists themselves sensed the name did not derive cleanly from Arabic morphology.

The word in Ibn ʿArabī's text and terminology.

The Faṣṣ Ādam excerpt only lists chapter-headings of the Fuṣūṣ — 'a Hārūnian wisdom in a Hārūnian word... an ʿAlawī wisdom in a Mūsawī word... a Ṣamadī wisdom in a Khālidī word' — where Mūsawiyya is simply the adjectival form of the prophet's name marking the chapter devoted to the wisdom associated with Moses (Faṣṣ Mūsawī, elsewhere in the book). This is a naming convention, not a technical deployment of the root m-w-s as a concept; the root itself carries no independent Akbarian terminological weight in the material given.