How to say "bench, couch — the ancestor of 'sofa'" in Arabic

English 'sofa' really does circle back to this word — Arabic ṣuffa, a raised sitting-bench, most famously the mosque bench of Muhammad's poorest companions, ahl aṣ-ṣuffa, touring Ottoman Turkish and French sofa/soffa on its way into English. Hebrew ספה's route is the better story: it isn't a borrowing of ṣuffa at all. Klein and Stahl trace it to a (mis)reading of סַפּוֹת in 2 Samuel 17:28, listed there among basins beside a mishkav, 'bed' — an unrelated biblical root for 'basin, threshold' that 19th-century revivers repurposed simply because it sounded like the internationally traveled word 'sofa'. Same furniture, same sound, two different roots. Today's spoken Arabic mostly says أَرِيكَة (arīka) or كَنَبَة (kanaba, itself from French canapé) for the actual couch.