The Feminine Superlative in Arabic: When to Use It

سوق

root: س-و-ق / noun / plural: أَسْواق / definition: market, bazaar

It’s nearing midnight and I’ve just returned from Souq Waqif having mistakenly ordered a very sugary tea of which I could only drink half before succumbing to the headache and nausea that now strike whenever I consume sugar.

A cup of (very much sugar-free) aniseed tea is keeping me company as I write this post in hopes that it will dilute some of the sweetness clinging to the back of my throat.

(It’s the next day. I couldn’t focus during the sugar rush.)

Enough about my post-sugar-addiction sugar-intolerance though, let’s get our teeth into some grammar.

Most of us are pretty familiar with the concept of Arabic superlatives by now. The masculine superlative follows the pattern أَفْعَل whilst the feminine form is فُعْلى.

(Check out this post to understand case endings for words with ى as their final letter!)

Here’s some examples of superlatives, in their masculine and feminine forms:

أَعظَم / عُظمى

the greatest

أَوسَط / وُسطى

the most central

أَقصى / قُصوى

the utmost

(from the defective root ق-ص-و)

أَحسَن / حُسنى

the best, most beautiful

There’s one thing though…

You may have noticed that, in practice, you don’t come across the feminine forms as much as you do the masculine ones. Odd, no?

Let’s run through the basics first. There are two main ways we can form superlative constructions:

a superlative followed by an indefinite noun (in a possessive construction, إضافة)
- e.g. أَكبَرُ مَكتَبٍ (the biggest office)
a definite noun followed by a definite superlative (like a regular, definite noun-adjective phrase)
- e.g. المَكتَبُ الأَكبَرُ (the biggest office)

However, the superlative only agrees in gender with the noun in the second type of construction.

So, for instance, if we wanted to say “the smallest city”, we could say either:

أَصغَر مَدينة (using the masculine form of the superlative)
المَدينة الصُّغرى (with the feminine form of the superlative acting like a regular adjective)

Notice that I mentioned these are the two main ways to form superlative constructions.

Another way is to use the superlative as the first term of an إضافة but this time follow it with a plural noun. In this case, the superlative is usually masculine but it may also be used in the feminine form (when, of course, the singular version of the noun is feminine).

So two other ways to say “the smallest city” are: