Abstract This article is a critical survey of contemporary Arabic lexicography, covering a period beginning roughly with the first edition of the Hans Wehr dictionary and extending to present-day corpus-based machine-readable dictionaries and online lexical databases. It covers both monolingual and bilingual Arabic lexicography relating to the standard written language, Modern Standard Arabic, and to the dialects; however, only bilingual publications in which Arabic is the source language are discussed. The article reviews the different solutions that both Standard Arabic and dialect dictionaries have found to the issue of lemma representation (i.e., the choice of phonetic script) and the issue of lemma organization (i.e., whether to follow a root-based arrangement or one that is purely phonetic and alphabetical).