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Abstract. Electronic Document Management (EDM) technology is being widely adopted as it makes for the efficient routing and retrieval of documents. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an important front end for such technology. Excellent OCR now exists for Latin based languages, but there are few systems that read Arabic, which limits the penetration of EDM into Arabicspeaking countries. In developing an OCR system for Arabic it is necessary to create a database of Arabic words. Such a database has many uses as well as in training and testing a recognition system. This paper provides a comprehensive study and analysis of Arabic words and explains how such a database was constructed. Unlike earlier studies, this paper describes a database developed using a large number of collected Arabic words (6 million). It also considers connected segments or Pieces of Arabic Words (PAWs) as well as Naked Pieces of Arabic Word (NPAWs); PAWS without diacritics. Background information concerning the Arabic language is also presented.