Five Arabic Words for the Metaphorical Heart

وَطَن

root: و-ط-ن / noun / plural: أَوْطان / definition: homeland

Is your homeland still your homeland if you’ve never set foot on its soil?

I don’t give myself much time to come up with an answer because my flight is due to take off in a matter of hours.

But perhaps it’s not that physical meeting of foot to soil that connects you to a place, but the residing of ancestral memories and a dialect suspended by migration in that intangible space within your chest that aches with an unfamiliar nostalgia. That intangible space that is your heart, or soul, or something similar.

And for referring to that space, that metaphorical heart, Arabic (like many other languages) has several terms. Let’s take a look at some of them:

قَلْب

root: ق-ل-ب

plural: قُلوب

قَلب is probably the first Arabic word that comes to mind when you think of the heart.

It refers to both the physical, tangible body part and that intangible dwelling space of feelings.

فُؤاد

root: ف-ء-د

plural: أَفْئِدة

The second word on this list is derived from a hamzated root, and is decidedly more metaphorical than the first.

The Hans Wehr also lists its meaning as “mind”—highlighting how it’s understood as a place of both feeling and thought, and emphasising the overlap between them.

(See Seats of the Hamza (ء) for an easy visual of how to write the hamza (e.g. ء ئ ؤ) depending on the phonological context!)

جَنان

root: ج-ن-ن

plural: أَجْنان

جَنان comes from a root related to the unseen and concealed entities.

From ج-ن-ن, we also get the words جِنّ (jinn, invisible beings), جَنّة (paradise), and جَنين (embryo, foetus).

لُبّ

root: ل-ب-ب

plural: أَلْباب

I had to include this word as, like I mentioned in Some Arabic-Akkadian Lexical Observations, it can also be found in Akkadian as libb with the same definitions: heart and middle.

لُبّ additionally carries the meanings of “reason” and “intellect”. It appears (in its plural form) several times in the Qur’an in the phrase أُولوا/أُولي الأَلْباب. See an example here.

(For more about أُولوا/أُولي and similar words, see Non-Human Nouns, Human Plurals.)

رُوع

root: ر-و-ع

plural: —

ر-و-ع is an interesting root; it relates to fear/alarm as well as delight/thrill. I guess they’re both related to adrenaline and the feeling of some sort of rush.

Oh, but don’t confuse رَوع (heart, mind, soul) with رُوع (fear, alarm, fright).

Under the noun رَوع, we find some interesting collocations like أَلقى في رَوعِهِ (to persuade someone into believing something, lit.: to cast something into someone’s heart).

Writing this post, my mind has been thinking about equivalent Turkish terms: the softness of gönül and the strength of yürek, in addition to the Arabic-derived noun kalp.

What other words do you know—either in Arabic or your native language—to refer to this metaphorical heart-soul?

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