Arabic lexical language resources in a cross-lingual perspective are a major issue in the development of NLP applications, in the context of present-day web interactive developments. Much has already been done, and some existing achievements will be mentioned. The bulk of the challenge, though, still remains ahead. The main contribution of this paper is methodological. The first section will endeavour to show some of the specific needs for an elaborated lexical database in Arabic, in relation with the structure of the writing system (‘unvowelled ’ writing and the structure of word-forms). Grammar-lexis relations are an essential part of any Arabic lexical resource. These relations operate at word-level in morphological analysers, and at sentence-level in morphosyntactic ones. Sets of finite and exhaustive morphosyntactic specifiers have already been elaborated at both word- and sentence-level, but have only been implemented at word-level. The second section is concerned with the cross-lingual aspects of lexical LR-s including Arabic. The author underlines the necessity, in the present state of the Art, of considering ‘multilingual ’ or ‘cross-lingual ’ lexical databases including Arabic as sets of oriented bilingual LR-s, in which one of the languages under consideration is the ‘source language ’ and the other, the ‘target language’. It is essential for the future of Arabic linguistic engineering that sets of bilingual resources of this type, including the morphosyntactic specifiers outlined in section 1, be elaborated and implemented in the coming years, and that a substantial number of them take Arabic as a ‘source language’.