Avraham Even-Shoshan

Avraham Even-Shoshan (Hebrew: אַבְרָהָם אֶבֶן שׁוֹשָׁן‬; 1906–1984) was a Russian-born Hebrew linguist and lexicographer, compiler of the Even-Shoshan dictionary, one of the foremost dictionaries of the Hebrew language.

Biography

Avraham Rosenstein, later Avraham Even-Shoshan, was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1906. He attended the cheder run by his father, who later sent him to public school and yeshiva.

Rosenstein managed to avoid the British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and settled there in 1925, where he changed his name to Even-Shoshan, a translation of Rosenstein, and initially worked as a laborer. He studied at the College for Hebrew Teachers (now the David Yellin Academic College of Education)^[1] in Jerusalem and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[2]

In 1946-58, Even-Shoshan compiled HaMilon HeHadash (New Dictionary of the Hebrew Language), which became known as the Even-Shoshan Dictionary. The completed dictionary consisted of 24,698 main entries.^[2] He was also the author of the Even-Shoshan concordance and co-author of the Bialik concordance.

Even-Shoshan died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1984.

Awards

• In 1978, Even-Shoshan was awarded the Israel Prize, for language.^[3]
• In 1981, he was the co-recipient (jointly with Zev Vilnay) of the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought.^[4]

Published works

• A New Concordance of the Bible: Thesaurus of the Language of the Bible, Hebrew and Aramaic, Roots, Words, Proper Names Phrases and Synonyms (1984)

References

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of Bialik Prize recipients