How to say "rainbow" in Arabic
New wordMeaningrainbow
Arabic · Modern Standard Arabic
qaws quzaḥקוס קזח
قوس قزح
Hebrew · Modern Hebrew
keshetكِشِت
How the two words are related
No Hebrew relative — learn it fresh.
Arabic root
ق-و-سQaws ('bow') doesn't actually line up with Hebrew קשת (qesheth) as a shared root — the rest of Semitic agrees on a final dental (Akkadian qaštu, Aramaic qeshta, Ugaritic qšt all end in a t/sh sound), while Arabic's qaws ends in س with a completely different consonant skeleton. A few Semiticists have floated a connection anyway, but there's no accepted correspondence here, so treat it as a fresh word. The two languages do share the same poetic image, though: a rainbow is a 'bow' across the sky in both (Hebrew קשת also means 'rainbow,' as in Noah's 'my bow in the clouds'), and Quzaḥ was a pre-Islamic god of storms — the whole Arabic phrase literally means 'the bow of Quzaḥ.'
Learn it
On the street
How people actually say it in the spoken dialects, where it differs from the standard word.
Levantine · Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria
Levantine drops both ق's to a glottal stop, as usual, and the aw diphthong monophthongizes to ō (qaws → ōs), the same shift heard in yōm for yawm.
Egyptian · Cairo and the Nile Delta
Cairo, too, drops both qāfs to glottal stops and flattens aw to ō.
In a phrase
I saw a rainbow