How to use Taqnilex

What Taqnilex is

Taqnilex extracts technical terms from institutional corpora (WIPO, United Nations, ALECSO/Arabterm, Microsoft Terminology) and shows every validated Arabic equivalent for an English term — or vice versa.

It is not a dictionary (no manually written definitions), not a machine translator, and not a chatbot. It is a terminological reference tool for professionals who need to prove that a specific Arabic term is the officially accepted equivalent.

Search direction: EN → AR vs AR → EN

The EN → AR mode takes an English term and returns its Arabic equivalents, grouped by source authority. Use it when you know the English term and need the validated Arabic form.

The AR → EN mode takes an Arabic term (with or without diacritics) and returns all English glosses found in the corpus. Use it to verify that an Arabic term you encountered is technically correct.

Note: the EN/AR/FR buttons in the top navigation change the interface language, not the search direction. These are two separate settings.

★ What the star badge means

A ★ next to a term means it is harmonised by ALECSO / the Arab League via the Arabterm terminological database. This is an institutional standard — the term has been reviewed and validated by Arabic-language experts under the authority of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization.

Terms without ★ come from other authoritative sources (WIPO, UN, Microsoft) and are valid but not formally harmonised across Arab countries. Click the ★ to filter the results to harmonised terms only.

The Variants panel (left)

The left panel shows all Arabic variants found for your query across the corpus. Each card shows:

• The Arabic term with full diacritics (vowel marks) when available
• Its English gloss from the same source
• Domain chip (Legal, Medical, Construction…)
• Source authority (Arabterm, WIPO Pearl, UN Terminology, Microsoft…)

Click any variant to load usage examples (concordance) for that specific form in the right panel. The copy button ⎘ copies the term with its English equivalent and source attribution.

The Concordance panel (right)

The right panel shows real sentences from institutional documents (patents, UN resolutions, technical reports) where the selected Arabic term appears. Sentences are in English with the Arabic term highlighted — this is intentional: the corpus is built from bilingual documents where Arabic terminology appears in English-language contexts.

Use the filter chips at the top of the concordance panel to narrow results to a specific variant form or English sense.

Sources