Literary period terminology sometimes creates artificial boundaries that impede, rather than facilitate, understanding the context of a particular literary work. This is especially noticeable in the Arabic context, where terms from Western literary criticism mingle, sometimes uncomfortably, with period or movement labels coming from within the tradition. An example is the word "modern--in its various forms (see title of paper)--where words used to render the Western idea of "modern," "modernism" and "contemporary" have been used in distinct ways throughout Arabic literary history. For example, the term muhdath (modern) is used in medieval times to refer to the poets of the early Islamic period (c. 680 C.E. to 900 C.E.). The cognate term hadith (modern) will be revived in the twentieth century to refer to the literary movement (heavily influenced by Western models) known as “modernism” I will begin with the work of Husayn al-Marsafi, whose Al-Wasilah al-adabiyah was the most influential literary work of the nineteenth century. Marsafi hewed closely to traditional categorization of literary works, which made no provision for dealing with literature after the 5th Islamic century. The task of creating terminology for describing recent and current literary efforts fell to his successors. By 1910, the Diwan Group was able to draw on a stable set of literary terms centered on the idea of the modern. A crucial bridge between Marsafi and the Diwan lies in the work of Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl (1862-1904). The work done by these early twentieth-century intellectuals will be disrupted and refashioned after World War II. This paper will examine how the words related to modernity have been re-appropriated and modified by these individuals in their quest for the contemporary.