596“sikbājah”: not in the Qāmūs but presumably the same as sikbāj.
597“ruṭab dates”: i.e., dates that are fresh but soft and sugary (and neither fresh and astringent nor dried).
598“wars”: a plant, Memecylon tinctorium, grown in Yemen, from whose roots a yellow dye (“Indian yellow”) is made.
599al-Faḥfāḥ and al-Kawthar: rivers in Paradise.
600“tasnīm”: the beverage of the blessed in Paradise.
601“among whom pass immortal youths….”: a collage of verses taken from three chapters of the Qurʾan, namely al-Wāqiʿah, al-Raḥmān, and al-Insān (Q Wāqiʿah 56:17–18, 20–21, 28–34; Raḥmān 55:46, 48, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 11–12, 76, 54, 15 (note that here the author incorrectly writes furushin for sururin); Insān 76:17–19, 21); the translation is Arberry’s, with minor adaptions.
602“zaqqūm”: see Volume One (n. 92 to 1.1.9).
603“and shade from a smoking blaze” (wa-ẓillin min yaḥmūmin): Q Wāqiʿah 56:43.
604“fire from a smokeless blaze” (mārij mina l-nār): Q Raḥmān 55:15.
605“it was wholesome, healthy, and of beneficial effect” (ṣāra marīʾan hanīʾan ḥandīda l-mighabbah): the quotation is from the Qāmūs, though the designation of the verb as the etymon of the noun appears to be the author’s.
606 “the glottal stop (hamz) in it is for purposes of elision (waṣl) and the elision (waṣl) in it is for purposes of compression (hamz)” (hamzuhā li-l-waṣl wa-waṣluhā li-l-hamz): the author plays with orthographic terminology, exploiting the fact that imraʾah begins (unusually for a concrete noun) with a glottal stop (hamz) that is elided when preceded by a word ending in a vowel and as such is distinguished from its non-elidable cousin by a sign called waṣl, while hamz also has the non-grammatical sense of “compression,” here to be understood as “sexual intercourse.”
607“its plural” etc.: no plural is made from imraʾah; words for “women” are from the root n-s-w and have different forms (e.g., niswah, nisāʾ, niswān).
608“in one language the word denotes ‘man’s woe’ and in another ‘pudendum’”: i.e., in English, “woman” is a phonetic anagram of “man’s woe” and in Ottoman Turkish the word for both “woman” and “pudendum” was 
(realized in modern Turkish as avrat for the former, avret for the latter).
609“qarīnah… whose etymology is well known”: probably an allusion to qarn (“horn”), from the same root, and its figurative reference to cuckoldry.
610“or vice versa”: i.e., perhaps, when she returns to her parents’ home in a fit of anger at her husband.
611See 2.16.65 below.
612“ḥadādah”: a word whose semantic link to others with the same root is left unexplained by the lexicographers; thus ḥadādatuka means “your wife” (Qāmūs), but why it does so is not clear. The same is true of niḍr, jathal, and ḥannah below.
613“ʿirs”: from the verb ʿarisa bi- meaning “to cleave to.”
614“shāʿah”: because, according to the Qāmūs, she takes her husband’s part (li-mushāyaʿatihā l-zawj).
615“the accession of women to the throne of England was an unalloyed blessing”: perhaps because the reign of Elizabeth I witnessed the irreversibility of Protestantism as the national creed.
616 “the two queens of England”: presumably, Mary and her successor Elizabeth I, the first queens regnant of England, the first of whom was Catholic, the second Protestant.
617“Irene, wife of Leo IV, and Theodora, wife of Theophilus”: Irene was Byzantine empress regnant from AD 797 to 802, while Theodora was regent for her son from AD 842 to 855. The significance of their being opposed here is not clear, since both, as anti-iconoclasts, took the same position with regard to the most important theological issue of their day.
618Chapter 15: the dots seem to imply a silent dialogue between the author and his pen, in which the former tries to persuade the latter to move on to a new topic while the latter refuses, insisting that the renewed discussion, instead of taking place “at some other point” (fī mawḍiʿin ākhar) as promised at the end of the preceding chapter, should, in fact, take place “right there” (fī dhālika l-mawḍiʿ), as indicated by the hand, namely immediately, in the following chapter. The extreme shortness of the chapter, the dots, and the pointing hand have been noted by scholars as examples of the influence of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (see, e.g., Alwan, Ahmad, chap. 3, sect. 11).
619“the mark of clemency” (simat al-ḥilm): a pun, in that the phrase may also be read as simat al-ḥalam (“the mark of the nipple”).
620Zubaydah daughter of Jaʿfar (d. 216/831) was cousin and wife of Hārūn al-Rashīd, fifth Abbasid caliph; this poem, which appears in many classical anthologies, is interpreted in those as illustrating (on the poet’s side) the danger of misusing a rhetorical feature and (on Zubayda’s) insight and generosity; thus, al-Nuwayrī (667–732/1279–1332) writes in his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, “When the poet recited the above, the slaves leapt up to beat him, but Zubayda said, ‘Let him be! He must be rewarded well, for he who means well and makes a mistake is better than he who means evil and is correct. He heard people saying, “Your nape is comelier than others’ faces and your left hand more generous than others’ right hands,” so he supposed that what he had written was of the same sort. Give him what he hoped for and teach him what he did not know’” (http://www.alwaraq.net/, accessed 8 July 2012). The author’s different interpretation (“his description was not wrong”) implies that Zubaydah accepted the validity of the poet’s comparison, in the sense, perhaps, that even with the tips of her toes she gave more than others gave with their whole hands.
621“ruḍāb”: literally, “saliva.”
622Genesis 36:20, “These are the sons of Seir the Horite, who inhabited the land; Lotan, and Shobal, and Zibeon, and Anah”; 36:24 “And these are the children of Zibeon; both Ajah, and Anah: this was that Anah that found the mules in the wilderness, as he fed the asses of Zibeon his father”; 36:29 “These are the dukes that came of the Horites; duke Lotan, duke Shobal, duke Zibeon, duke Anah.”
623“… or a kind of ornament for the hands or the feet”: the entry in the Qāmūs reads “quffāz…: something made for the hands that is stuffed with cotton and that women wear against the cold [sc. ‘gloves’], or a kind of ornament for the hands or the feet,” etc.
624“… or decorative earrings”: the entry in the Qāmūs reads “sals…: the string on which the white beads worn by slave girls are strung, or decorative earrings.”