The Mamluk period was a golden age of encyclopaedic and lexicographic literature. It witnessed the composition of large-scale scribal manuals and adab collections by figures such as Shih?b al-D?n al-Nuwayr?, Ibn Fa?l All?h al-‘Umar?, and al-Qalqashand?, as well as enormous dictionaries, such as the famous Lis?n al-‘Arab of Ibn Man??r. While serving different functions and containing different materials, these works were nonetheless engaged in a shared project of navigating, organizing, and making sense of an enormous lexical corpus and the literary patrimony that proceeded from it. In al-Nuwayr?’s thirty-volume encyclopaedia, Nih?yat al-Arab f? Fun?n al-Adab, for example, the reader encounters a mind-boggling variety of topics. Marrying the thematic organization of earlier glossaries such as al-Tha‘?lib?’s Fiqh al-lugha with the all-encompassing ambition of a comprehensive dictionary, the Nih?ya contains everything from taxonomies of cloud formations, to long lists of synonyms and distinctions for different kinds of eyebrows, thunderbolts, skin pigments, time-keeping instruments, fishing boats, waterwheels, hair dyes, hundreds of animals, birds, flowers and trees, and much more. As such, the work is a textual mirror of the known universe, an attempt to map the Arabic lexicon onto the social, economic, and intellectual landscapes of an entire civilization. My paper is dedicated to answering the question: “Where does the ethic of eloquence (bal?gha) fit into all of this?” In other words, to what extent did considerations of a prescriptive nature concerning the character of praiseworthy speech intrude upon the work of a Mamluk encyclopaedist such as al-Nuwayr?? Did his work amount to collecting choice bits of verse to illustrate ‘the best that has been said’, or was he engaged in a different project? Assuming that a cultural ideal of “bal?gha” had at least something to do with his motivations, is it still not relevant to wonder what bal?gha meant to al-Nuwayr?, living centuries after many of the poets he anthologized? Simply put, did bal?gha mean the same thing to Mamluk-era encyclopaedists as it did to Abbasid poets? To answer these questions, I will compare selections from al-Nuwayr?’s work with parallel chapters in earlier texts from the adab tradition (such as Ibn Qutayba’s ‘Uy?n al-Akhb?r, Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi’s al-‘Iqd al-Far?d, and Ibn ?amd?n’s Tadhkira), demonstrating the ways in which the concept of bal?gha was both susceptible and impervious to historical development.