نهأmeat that has not finished cooking (root nh)

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

Al-Khalīl gives the core sense directly: al-nahīʾ, on the pattern faʿīl, is meat that 'lam yanḍuj' — has not become ripe/cooked, with the verb nahuʾa and the maṣdars nahāʾa and nahūʾ. Al-Jawharī adds the fuller paradigm (nahiʾa yanhaʾu nahʾan, nahaʾan, nahāʾatan, nahūʾatan) and records the proverb 'mā ubālī mā nahiʾa min ḍabbika' (I do not care what remains raw of your lizard-meat), an expression of indifference, alongside the causative anhaʾa, to leave something uncooked. Ibn Fāris treats the root as a single word explained by consonant substitution (ibdāl): he holds anhaʾa al-laḥm is, in origin, anyaʾahu from the root n-y-ʾ (rawness), with hāʾ standing in for yāʾ. Ibn Manẓūr repeats the full paradigm, notes an anomalous (shādhdh) form nahāwatan, and records two idiomatic extensions: anhaʾa al-amra, to leave a matter unfinished/unmatured, and a report from Ibn al-Aʿrābī that al-nāhiʾ can mean the sated and well-watered one — a curious drift toward fullness that the lexicographers record without reconciling with the base sense of unfinishedness.

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

In the akbarī scheme, nūn is assigned to the fourth heaven and, by al-Dabbāgh, to the good kindled within the self; hāʾ marks the beginning of the world for Ibn ʿArabī and pure, unending mercy for al-Dabbāgh. One could speculatively read a state 'prior to ripeness' (nahīʾ) as consonant with letters tied to beginnings and to a good still latent rather than manifest, but no source given here applies these letter-meanings to this specific root, and the connection is offered purely as suggestion. Mainstream linguistics does not accord phoneme-level symbolism independent explanatory weight.

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

Ibn Fāris himself marks ن-ه-أ as not an independent triliteral sense but a substitution-variant of ن-ي-أ (rawness), which sets it apart from its Maqāyīs chapter-neighbors — نهب (plunder), نهد (the breast's rising), نهر (a river's cleaving), نهض (rising up), نهش/نهس (biting) — which are all forceful, dynamic actions, whereas nahaʾa denotes a static absence of completion. Among the permutations, هنأ (attested 4 times, denoting an unearned good that arrives without hardship, as in hanīʾan) stands in a suggestive metathetic relation to نهأ: one names a wholesome, completed good, the other an unready, unfinished state. Ibn Jinnī's greater derivation (al-taṣrīf al-akbar) would be alert to exactly this kind of opposition produced by transposing the same two root letters, but this is offered here as juxtaposition, not as an asserted etymological link.

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

Ibn Fāris's own analysis — that نهأ is a hāʾ-for-yāʾ substitution of ن-ي-أ — points toward the genuinely pan-Semitic root for rawness seen in Arabic nayyiʾ and Hebrew נָא (nāʾ, 'raw', as in the Passover instruction not to eat the meat raw, Exodus 12:9). This supports treating نهأ as a secondary Arabic-internal phonetic variant of a shared Semitic root for uncooked meat rather than a separate lexeme with its own cross-Semitic cognate set. No distinct Aramaic, Akkadian, or Geʿez cognate specifically matching the ن-ه-أ shape (with hāʾ) is confidently attested.