As discussed before, Arabic is a highly derivational language, and we can derive different forms from one another. We learned how to make an active participle from a verb. In this post, I discuss a special type of noun that can be derived from verbs, namely (اسم المكان) “noun of place”. It is a noun that indicates the place of doing an action. It follows one of two patterns (مفعل) and (مفعلة), e.g. the verb (دخل) means “enter”, and from this root verb we have (مدخل) which means “entrance”, and the verb (درس) means “study”, and from this root verb we have (مدرسة) which means “school”.

It should be noted that not all verbs can be used in this form. Moreover, there is no rule to tell us which form we can use to make noun of place from a certain verb. Sometimes, we find verbs that have 2 forms of noun of place with different meanings, e.g. he verb (كتب) means “write”, and from this root verb we have 2 nouns of place (مكتب) which means “office or desk”, and (مكتبة) which means “library”. This is a very useful form to learn and remember because it can help us guess the meanings of some nouns that we encounter if we know the root verb and what it means. Below, I list some common verbs and their noun of place.