Abu Dawud Sulayman ibn al-Ash'ath al-Azdi al-Sijistani was born around 202 AH (817–818 CE) in Sijistan, a province of Khurasan straddling what is now the Iran–Afghanistan border. He reached Baghdad at eighteen and went on to travel through Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria, Egypt, and Nishapur in search of hadith, studying under some 300 scholars in the process, among them Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He settled in Basra, where he died on a Friday in Shawwal 275 AH (889 CE) at the age of seventy-three and was buried beside the jurist Sufyan al-Thawri.
His interest was specifically legal: unlike Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, which range across belief, history, and law alike, Abu Dawud built his Sunan around hadith bearing on fiqh, arranging it into books that move through the subjects a jurist needs — purification, prayer, zakat, fasting, marriage, inheritance, judgeship, and the rest. According to his student Ibn Dasah, he examined some 500,000 hadith reports in gathering the material. He set a different standard than al-Bukhari and Muslim too: where they admitted only hadith they judged fully authenticated, Abu Dawud included some mursal, weak (da'if), and even munkar reports when no stronger hadith addressed a given legal point, explaining his method in a letter to the people of Mecca and noting the weaker gradings himself rather than leaving them unmarked.
Sunni tradition counts Sunan Abi Dawud third among the Six Books (Kutub al-Sittah), after Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim; where exactly it, Jami` at-Tirmidhi, Sunan an-Nasa'i, and Sunan Ibn Majah rank relative to one another among the remaining four has long been argued rather than settled. The counts given for the book disagree with each other in a way nobody seems to have reconciled: Ibn Dasah's figure for what Abu Dawud selected is 4,800 hadith, while the modern standard edition — edited by Muhammad Muhyiddin Abd al-Hamid and printed in Cairo in 1935 — numbers 5,274. This corpus's own count, 43 books and 5,274 hadith, matches that Cairo edition's numbering exactly, which puts it on firmer ground than Sahih al-Bukhari or Sahih Muslim here, where this corpus's count reproduces no single print tradition.
The Arabic text here is the classical matn, in the public domain. Beneath it in the reader sits an English translation, drawn from the fawazahmed0/hadith-api's eng-abudawud edition and aligned hadith-for-hadith with the Arabic so the two can be read as a pair — the same companion arrangement this corpus uses for Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, and its Qur'an translations. Which published English translation that file itself descends from has not been pinned down on this corpus's side, which is why its licence is marked under review rather than public domain outright; the Arabic above it carries no such uncertainty.