George Sale (c. 1697-1736), English orientalist, was the son of a London merchant. In 1720 he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, but subsequently practised as a solicitor. Having studied Arabic for some time in England, he became, in 1726, one of the correctors of the Arabic version of the New Testament, begun in 1720 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and subsequently took the principal part in the work. He made an extremely paraphrastic, but, for his time, admirable English translation of the Koran (1734 and often reprinted), and had a European reputation as an orientalist. He died on the 13th of November 1736. His collection of oriental manuscripts is now in the Bodleian library, Oxford.
George Sale
