Natural stone trade glossary, English and Arabic

Compiled by Phoenician Stone Group, this English-Arabic glossary defines the terms of the natural stone trade, from stone families, finishes and formats to test specifications and industrial minerals, so that buyer and supplier on either side of a Syrian stone order mean the same thing by the same word.

Machine-readable version of the site's bilingual glossary: 34 natural stone, finish, format, specification and mineral terms with English and Arabic definitions, Arabic spelling variants, Wikidata identifiers and sources.

Files

• psg-stone-glossary-v1.csv: 34 rows, 18,156 bytes
• psg-stone-glossary-v1.json: 34 rows, 27,079 bytes

Method

• Export of the site glossary (content/visibility/glossary_v02.json); definitions as published on the glossary page.
• Finish definitions are taken from the site's stone-page texts.
• Wikidata identifiers were checked on 9 November 2026.

Limits

• Plain-language definitions written by Phoenician Stone Group; where a source URL is given it is a reference for the facts, not copied text.
• Standards (EN 13755, EN 1936) are named but not reproduced.

Rights and credit

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . Copyright 2026 Phoenician Stone Group for this compilation.

Wikidata identifiers are CC0 data from Wikidata. All other text was written by Phoenician Stone Group.

Attribution requested: Phoenician Stone Group.

Online: dataset page (English) https://phoenicianstone.net/data/stone-trade-glossary/; Arabic https://phoenicianstone.net/ar/data/stone-trade-glossary/; catalogue https://phoenicianstone.net/data/. The same files, with a data viewer: https://huggingface.co/datasets/phoenician-stone-group/syrian-natural-stone-open-data.

About the publisher

Phoenician Stone Group is a Syrian natural stone company, founded in 2004, with its own quarries and production in Syria and its sales and client service run from Europe. It quarries, processes and exports limestone, fossil limestone (shell stone), travertine and volcanic basalt, and supplies industrial minerals.

It publishes these data because buyers, specifiers and researchers have little reliable, sourced information on Syrian stone and its trade, and much of what circulates predates the changes in Syria's trade rules since 2025. Every figure is tied to a dated public source, so that it can be checked independently and corrected openly in a new version.

Disclosure: A neutral bilingual terminology table; it contains no claims about the company. Website: https://phoenicianstone.net/.

Related reading from Phoenician Stone Group

• Syrian Natural Stone Guide: Limestone to Basalt: how the nine stones differ, and which finishes and formats each comes in.
• Aleppo Stone and Syrian Limestone: A Buyer's Guide: why "Aleppo stone" is a regional name rather than a quality standard.
• Hauran Basalt and Syrian Basalt: A Buyer's Guide: where southern Syria's black stone comes from, and how Bosra was built from it.
• Exporting Syrian Stone: A Practical Guide for Buyers: from the first enquiry to the containers, what to agree in writing and which documents to expect.
• Syrian Stone, Sourced the European Way: how an order from the company's own quarries is checked, documented and handled by its sales team in Europe.
• The Mediterranean Has More Than One Shore: Syria's place among the Mediterranean's stone origins, from Ugarit's harbour to the port of Latakia.

How to cite: Phoenician Stone Group (2026). Natural stone trade glossary, English and Arabic (version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24108345