 In Ilāhiyyāt, I, 5 Avicenna summarizes the meanings of the term mawǧūd (“existent”) and of the locutions that are related to it: “thing”  (šayʾ),[8]  but also “what” (mā), “that” (allaḏī), “what is given” or “realized” (al-muḥaṣṣal) and “what is affirmed” or “established” (al-muṯbat). On the one hand, there are the existent and the thing as first notions: both indicate being as what cannot be known through anything other than itself, so that knowledge is built on it. On the other, there is what the word “thing” may also indicate in every language: “the reality whereby every thing (amr) is what it is” (Ilāhiyyāt, I, 5, 31, 5–6; cf. VI, 5, 292, 1–5). 