Al-Tawil

The word

Lisān al-ʿArab gives al-ṭūl as the opposite of shortness — in a body, in a rope, in a stretch of time — and sets beside it, in the same entry, al-ṭawl: capacity, means, and the giving that follows from them, the sense carried in the divine name dhū al-ṭawl. From the root it also gives al-ṭiwal, the long tether by which a beast is fastened so that it can graze in a circle. The idioms lean on both branches at once: ṭawīl al-nijād, long of baldric, is said of a tall man, because the sword-belt of a tall man is long; ṭawīl al-yad is said of one whose reach extends far, and of one whose giving does.

A byname, then a name

Said of a man, ṭawīl is the plain word for his height, and it worked as bynames of this kind work: it separated him from another man of his name, in speech first and then in whatever was written down. The word then outlived him. It was set after his son's name and became the name of a household, at which point it had stopped being a description of anybody — a family called al-Ṭawīl records only that a man in it was once told apart this way.

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.