, Sāʾid (a., pls. asyād , sāda , sādāt , abstract nouns siyāda , suʾdad , etc.), originally, chief, e.g. of an Arabian tribe, and then, in Islamic times, a title of honour for descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad, being in this respect in many ways coterminous with the term s̲h̲arīf .
Sayyid was used in ancient South Arabian, where it appears as s 1 wd “chieftain” (A.F.L. Beeston, etc., ¶ Sabaic dictionary, Louvain-Beirut 1982, 129), but the root seems to be largely absent from North-Western Semitic, being only dubiously attested in Elephantine Aramaic (J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling, Dictionar…