How to say "story" in Arabic
Shifted meaningMeaningstory
Arabic · Modern Standard Arabic
qiṣṣaקצה
قصة
Hebrew · Modern Hebrew
sipurسِيپُور
How the two words are related
Same root as a Hebrew word, but the meaning drifted over the centuries.
Arabic root
ق-ص-صHebrew root
ק-צ-צArabic qaṣṣa means both "to cut" and "to tell a tale" — a story follows a trail, clip by clip. Hebrew קצץ ("to chop") is the same root, keeping the literal edge.
Related Hebrew word:קצץkatsatsكَاتْسَاتْس
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
The qāf becomes a glottal stop in urban Levantine.
Egyptian · Cairo and the Nile Delta
Cairo, too, turns the qāf into a glottal stop: ʾiṣṣa.
Moroccan · Morocco — Casablanca, Rabat, Fes
Darija keeps the q: qeṣṣa.
In a phrase
a short story
Plural
broken plural CiCaC — the regular plural for CiCCa-shaped nouns