  In this paper, we introduce the first phase of a new dataset for offline
Arabic handwriting recognition. The aim is to collect a very large dataset of
isolated Arabic words that covers all letters of the alphabet in all possible
shapes using a small number of simple words. The end goal is to collect a very
large dataset of segmented letter images, which can be used to build and
evaluate Arabic handwriting recognition systems that are based on segmented
letter recognition. The current version of the dataset contains $25114$ samples
of $109$ unique Arabic words that cover all possible shapes of all alphabet
letters. The samples were collected from $907$ writers. In its current form,
the dataset can be used for the problem of closed-vocabulary word recognition.
We evaluated a number of window-based descriptors and classifiers on this task
and obtained an accuracy of $92.16\%$ using a SIFT-based descriptor and ANN.
