What does “تهريب” (tahrīb) mean in Arabic?

تهريب (tahrīb) means “smuggling.” The derivation runs in three steps: هرب (harab), “to run away,” becomes هرّب (harrab), “to smuggle,” literally “to make something run away,” and its noun is تهريب. Goods or people are made to slip past a border. It’s an everyday news word across the Arab world, and the smuggler himself is a مهرّب (muharrib).

The joke is a list of numbers. One passport “gets me into 73 countries,” the next into 52, then 87, 185 and 112. The last one gets its owner into “every country in the world.” How? تهريب. The numbers are good practice in their own right: ثلاثة وسبعين, اثنين وخمسين, مية وخمسة وتمانين. In Arabic the units come before the tens, like the old English “four-and-twenty.”