How to say "brush" in Arabic
Shifted meaningMeaningbrush
Arabic · Modern Standard Arabic
furshāhפרשאה
فرشاة
Hebrew · Modern Hebrew
mivreshetمِڤْرِشِت
How the two words are related
Same root as a Hebrew word, but the meaning drifted over the centuries.
Arabic root
ف-ر-شHebrew root
פ-ר-שׂHebrew's actual word for brush, מברשת, is unrelated (root ב-ר-שׂ). But Arabic's root here, ف-ر-ش ('to spread out, furnish' — فراش is a mattress, فرش is carpeting), is a real cognate of Hebrew פ-ר-שׂ, 'to spread out' (לפרוש, as in spreading wings or a cloth): this is the sin/shin correspondence (Hebrew שׂ↔Arabic ش), not the shin one, so the match is genuine even though it doesn't look obvious at a glance. A furshāh's bristles, fittingly, fan out.
Related Hebrew word:פרשׂparasپَارَاس
Learn it
On the street
How people actually say it in the spoken dialects, where it differs from the standard word.
Egyptian · Cairo and the Nile Delta
Cairo says fursha.
Moroccan · Morocco — Casablanca, Rabat, Fes
Darija's brush is a shīta.
In a phrase
a toothbrush
Plural
broken plural CuCaC