This paper proposes an outline for a conceptual history of two modern Arabic words for revolution—-inqilab and thawrah—-that have taken center-stage in post-Arab Spring discourse. In current usage, thawrah is understood to mean a democratic, popular movement that engenders bottom-up change while inqilab designates a coup d’etat that enforces elite will upon the masses. This is evident, for example, in recent framings of attempts by entrenched political actors in post-Mubarak Egypt to impose constitutional reforms as an “inqilab against the thawrah,” implying a hijacking, thwarting and containment of the people’s revolution. This paper raises the diachronic questions of when and how inqilab and thawrah acquired their contemporary meanings over the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as posing a synchronic inquiry into the inescapability that characterizes these concepts’ relation to one another. Thawrah, inqilab and their derivatives often appear in texts together, posed in dialectical opposition, in dialogue, or used interchangeably. My readings of individual texts in their discursive contexts highlight this unique representational aspect of the concepts’ respective meanings and thereby lay the groundwork for theorizing its significance. My investigation into inqilab and thawrah traces their trajectories through semantic-ideological fields centered around a series of “revolutionary” events that starts with the Young Turks’ Constitutional Revolution, passing through the interwar nationalist uprisings and mid-century free officers’ coups, to end with the Arab Spring. I thus engage with a range of texts, including Ruhi al-Khalidi’s The Ottoman Revolution (1908), Qunstantin Zurayq’s The Meaning of the Nakba (1948), Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s Philosophy of Revolution (1966), and ‘Azmi Bshara’s On Revolution and the Potential for Revolution (2012), in addition to drawing upon various Arabic lexicons. My analysis indicates that thawrah did not fully gain its contemporary conceptual baggage until the mid-20th century, when post-colonial Arab regimes framed their “revolutionary” state praxis as thawrah. Before then, thawrah was understood as chaotic popular revolt that was separate from inqilab, which had been a term of purchase used since the early 20th century to describe systematic structural (political and legal) change, only to be narrowed over the century’s latter half into a term for coup. My paper reveals the diverse discussions of thawrah and inqilab as similarly working to articulate a temporality that mediates and legitimates the transformative entrance of an inherited (Arab and/or Islamic) historical subjectivity into a universal teleology of progress at the site of the modern revolutionary event.