Al-Kabir

The word

Lisān al-ʿArab distinguishes several things the root carries. Al-kibar is advance in years; al-kibr is greatness; and al-kubr is precedence of descent — the lexicon glosses it as the eldest of a man's children and as the standing of the senior line, and quotes the usage in which the kabīr of a people is the one who speaks first for them. Largeness in bulk is present in the root but is not what most of the entry is about: the word is more often about who comes first than about what is big.

The elder of two men of one name

In a name the word usually belongs to a pair. When a boy is called after his grandfather or his uncle — the ordinary way Arab given names circulate through a household — two men of one name live in the same house at once, and they are separated in speech and in registers as al-kabīr and al-ṣaghīr, the elder and the younger. Nothing is being described; the words are telling two people apart. Where the distinction outlived the men, the descendants of the elder could keep it, and al-Kabīr settled as the name of that branch.

Bearing the name

A family name of this kind records a byname that was applied to one ancestor and then stayed with his descendants. It reports how he was called, not a lineage, and it says nothing about the body, the character or the standing of anyone who bears it now. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the word itself.