Four Synonyms for “to Begin to” in Arabic

مُرادِف

root: ر-د-ف / noun, active participle of form III / plural: مُرادِفات / definition: synonym

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About a month ago, I posted Four Common Words for “to Become” in Arabic. And now we can add some more variety to our Arabic mental lexicons again—this time with four common Arabic words for “to begin/start to”!

All of the form I verbs below mean “to begin to” when they are followed by a present tense verb (examples at the bottom):

بَدَأَ

root: ب-د-ء

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أَخَذَ

root: ء-خ-ذ

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راحَ

root: ر-و-ح

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شَرَعَ

root: ش-ر-ع

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(Note: remember, these verbs will need to be conjugated according to the subject that they are referring to.)

Examples:

بَدَأُوا يَكْتَشِفون الآثار مِن المَمْلَكَة القَديمة

they began to discover the remnants of the ancient kingdom

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أَخَذَت الحالة تَتَدَهْوَر في الثَلاثينات مِن القَرْن العِشْرين

the situation started to deteriorate in the 1930s

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الرَئِيس شَرَعَ يُنَفِّذ القَوانين الجَديدة

the president began to implement the new laws

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“أَو شُرْفَتانِ راحَ يَنْأى عَنْهُما القَمَر”

“or two balconies from which the moon(light) begins to depart”

(This example is taken from the second line of the famous poem أنشودة المطر (or “Rain Song”) by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab—one of the poems I analysed for my dissertation!)

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I hope this was useful and, as always, feel free to leave any comments or questions below!

!إلى اللقاء

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