The term ṣifa lit. ‘feature, attribute, property’, from the root w-ṣ-f ‘to describe’, belongs to the earliest stock of Arabic grammatical terminology. In later grammar, its meaning became more or less fixed for a category of words corresponding to the adjective and the attribute in the Greco-Latin tradition, but originally it was used for a variety of meanings.

The term ṣifa is one of a functional pair ṣifa/mawṣūf, which is analogous in meaning to the terminological pairs musnad/musnad ʾilayhi (ʾisnād) and muxbar bihi/muxbar ʿanhu (xabar), as al-Fārābī (d. 339/950; ʾAlfāḏ̣ 57) expla…