A place that represents an entity while expressing a physical location – gains its identity from the nature of the events or assets that took place around it, and the study of geographical names and their meaning reveals important historical information about the place through a time period encompassing languages and customs that have died out. The names of ancient sites in the United Arab Emirates are part of its historical and geographical heritage, and its cultural identity, many of which have been eradicated by urban sprawl and become absent from contemporary memory.

In this book, the author has collected and investigated many geographical names and has dealt with their history, nature, relationship to the surrounding environment, and the changes that took place in their pronunciation as a result of the presence of other nationalities who face difficulty pronouncing some Arabic names. As a result, the name or pronunciation has been altered, therefore, the author verified whether or not the correct names were present, then verified the correctness of its pronunciation and the way it was written. He has answered one’s questions: How and when were places named? And who gave them these names?

This book has also dealt with some of the foundations and regulations followed when naming places and the methods of writing names in Arabic for non-native speakers. It has also reviewed in some detail the places of population and ancient settlements in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, the important previously inhabited islands, some wild populations and their means of transportation. He has singled out a chapter to increase the detail on the records of Iliwa and its date palms and extracted detailed statistics on its population and the number of its date palms. He has concluded the book by describing 1,195 names and mentioning more than 3,500 geographical names in the form of a mini-dictionary of geographical names in the United Arab Emirates, and has clarified this on maps. In this study, he has differentiated between known and lost place names, correct and weak ones, and has chosen the ones closest to fact and farthest from doubt.