In Arabic, nearly every term has a triliteral (i.e. three-letter) Root; arguably, the majority of terms in Arabic are ultimately no more than a root placed in one of a few high-frequency word patterns. For instance, the root of مدرسة ("school") is د ر س. Note that roots are not lexical items: they are not terms with a defined meaning; they are simply what remains of a term once you remove the elements of the pattern. If you remove the root from madrase, you get a pattern often used for location nouns; if you remove the pattern, you get a root related to studies. Only together, they mean "school".

Some terms (e.g. ترجمة) have quadriliteral (i.e. four-letter) roots. Specific morphological (i.e. word-formation) patterns exist for quadriliteral roots, whereas none exist for terms with "roots" with anything other than 3/4 letters. Accordingly, I consider terms like من (min) as simply having no root. Terms with more than 4 letters that are not part of a particular morphological pattern (e.g. تلفزيون) are practically always loanwords that are not morphologically flexible. However, native morphological patterns are extended to loanwords from which 3/4 root consonants may be extracted.

Accordingly, not all terms in the dictionary have a Root section. However, for those that do include it, the section indicates the term's root alongside a list of all other terms with the same root.