Francis Joseph Steingass
British linguist (1825–1903)

Francis Joseph Steingass (March 16, 1825, Frankfurt am Main – January 1903) was a British linguist and orientalist.
Biography
Steingass completed his education, including a PhD, in Munich, Germany. Later, he was a professor of Modern Languages at Birmingham and a professor of Modern Languages and Resident Lecturer on Arabic Languages, Literature & Law at the Oriental Institute, Woking, Surrey, England.
He mastered 14 languages, including Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. He published a number of Persian-English, Arabic-English and English-Arabic dictionaries.
Works
Author
Steingass (1882). English-Arabic dictionary: for the use of both travellers and students. London: W. H. Allen & Co. Retrieved 6 July 2011. Another digitised copy is here.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Joseph Steingass” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.