نحوaiming, intending the direction of something (root nhw)

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

Only al-Khalīl and Ibn Fāris are attested for this root in the material given — no Ṣiḥāḥ, Mufradāt, Lisān, or Lane entries are supplied. al-Khalīl gives النحو as القصد: النحو: القصد نحو الشيء, 'to aim/intend toward a thing,' and reports that Abū l-Aswad al-Duʾalī, credited with devising the rules of Arabic grammar, told people انحوا نحو هذا, 'pattern yourselves after this,' whence the discipline was named al-naḥw; he also glosses الناحية as 'the side, region' of a thing, plural أنحاء. Ibn Fāris confirms the same single meaning, قصد, and extends the naming-etymology explicitly: grammar is called naḥw because it 'aims at the fundamentals of speech' (يقصد أصول الكلام), so that one speaks as the Arabs used to speak; he adds the verb انتحى, 'he aimed at, sought out,' and notes a tribe reportedly called Naḥw. Together the two sources show a single core — directed intention — supplying both the ordinary sense 'toward, in the direction of' and, by extension, the name of the grammatical science.

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

In the given correspondences, ن is assigned to the Fourth Heaven, ح to 'the dust-like substance' (al-jawhar al-habāʾī), and و to 'the determination of ranks, stations, and waystations' (taʿyīn al-rutab wa-l-maqāmāt wa-l-manāzil). The last value for و resonates suggestively with naḥw's core sense of directed aiming — fixing a rank or point toward which one moves — and with its later technical senses (nāḥiya, 'side/region'; iʿrāb, the grammatical marking of a word's 'direction'). al-Dabbāgh's fatḥa-values describe ن as 'the good dwelling in the self, kindling within it,' ح as denoting 'encompassing and inclusion of everything,' and و as 'the intertwined things in a human being, such as veins and fingers.' These readings are offered only as suggestive sound-symbolism; mainstream historical linguistics assigns no fixed meaning to individual Arabic letters.

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

Ibn Fāris's ن-ح chapter groups a semantically scattered set under the shared first two radicals: نحس (ill luck; smoke without flame), نحص (a rare term for a barren she-ass), نحض (flesh, meat), نحط (an onomatopoeic sound), نحف (emaciation), نحل (three senses: emaciation, giving, and false claiming), نحو (aiming/intending), نحى (a skin for clarified butter), نحب (vow/oath, and a sound), and نحت (carving, whence نحيتة, 'innate disposition,' as if character were 'carved' into a person); Ibn Fāris offers no unifying sense for ن-ح itself. Among the permutations, نوح is independently attested with the sense تقابل, 'mutual facing' (تناوح الجبلان: two mountains facing each other) — an orientational meaning close to naḥw's own 'aiming toward,' the kind of case Ibn Jinnī's greater-derivation method would flag as a plausible resonance between related letter-combinations, without asserting it as fact. حنو is likewise glossed, unattested as an independent chapter entry, as تعطف وتعوج, 'bending, inclining' — again adjacent to naḥw's directional sense. حون, ونح and وحن carry no recorded content in the given material.

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

No confident Semitic cognate for ن-ح-و in the sense 'to aim, intend the direction of' is identifiable in Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac, Akkadian, or Geʿez. Hebrew nokhaḥ ('opposite, facing,' root נ-כ-ח) is sometimes noted for its similar directional sense, but the consonant correspondence (kaph vs. ḥāʾ) is irregular, so this is not a secure cognate. The root shows no features suggesting borrowing; its use as the name of the grammatical discipline (ʿilm al-naḥw) is an internal Arabic semantic extension, not a loan.