[freshyill]

As a sometimes Scrabble player, I was familiar with the word and I knew it was some kind of aqueduct. It's nice to know more. Amazing that ancient people not only knew to make them, but that they could pull it off. This must have been no small engineering feat.

[rtpg]

Hard mode in Scrabble is giving definitions to all those weird words you memorise just for Scrabble....

[zem]

the arabic word for them, FALAJ (and its plural AFLAJ) are also useful scrabble words (lowish probability, but very useful when you do have them playable)

[ithinkso]

Quite interesting how plural form is an simple anagram of singular form. Is it common in arabic or just a lucky coincidence?

[mootothemax]

I know absolutely nothing about Arabic, and stumbled across this page about Broken Plurals on wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_plural

Look a few rows into the patterns table, and you start seeing fun rearrangements for patterns such as CaCaC -> ʼaCCāC, the example being sabab -> ʼasbāb.

Pretty fascinating stuff!

[aedron]

It is one of the common plural forms. (In Arabic writing the words look even more similar, since it is only the three consonants, with diacritical marks above and below to represent the vowels.)