Lybia, he calleth Sarra, for so the Arabians call a desert.
-Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage…,1613, example offered by the OED as the earliest usage of the word Sahara and its variant spellings, incl. Zaara, Zaarra, Zaharah, Saharah, Sahra, etc.
The Oxford English Dictionary has nothing over Lane’s entry for Sahrā’, which he gives as, Imperfectly Declined though not an Epithet, or It is an Epithet in which the Quality of the Substantive Predominates and is Imperfectly Declined because it is of the Feminine Gender. One of its forms is Sahrāwi, which besides the proper name for the people fighting Morocco for their independence, and the sobriquet of a terrorist in Mali with a $5 Million bounty on his head whose death was announced today, is the adjective I used when telling KhairAllah, Tit’ab al-Sikka al-Sahrāwi, The Saharan Road is Tiring, a self-evident statement he never bothered to answer. Lane’s definition for its triliteral root S-H-R in Form I is, He (an Ass) Brayed more Vehemently than the Neighing of Horses, a verb which likely came to KhairAllah’s mind whenever I spoke about the desert.