أ م ر (ʾ-m-r): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root ʾ-m-r

The Arabic root أ م ر (ʾ-m-r) occurs 248 times in the Quran, in 6 different words, and is number 38 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is أَمْر (amr), 166 times, followed by أَمَرَ (amara), 77 times.

What the root ʾ-m-r means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb أَمَرَ (amara) as "to order, to command". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: يَأْتَمِرُ (yaʾtamiru), form VIII, "to consult". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, أَمْر (amr) is most often rendered "a matter".

One letter of ʾ-m-r is a hamza, the glottal stop. Arabic writes a hamza on a seat chosen by the vowels around it (أ, إ, ؤ, ئ, or ء on its own), so words from a hamza root can look different from one another, as the root's words أَمْر (amr) and ءَامِرُون (āmirūn) do.

Every word from the root ʾ-m-r in the Quran

The Quran builds 6 different words on ʾ-m-r. The table lists them from most to least frequent, with the spelling the corpus gives each one, its word type, its meaning and its number of occurrences. Verbs account for 79 of the 248 occurrences, in forms I and VIII; the rest are nouns, adjectives and participles.

Meanings in quotation marks are MASAQ word-by-word glosses, the others the corpus dictionary's, and the word types follow the dictionary. Every count on this page is a lemma count from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, version 0.4. We compared each of these 6 counts, and the root total of 248, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for ʾ-m-r, and all of them match.

The root ʾ-m-r in the verses of the Quran

Words from ʾ-m-r appear in 226 verses spread over 61 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 11 has the most of them, 15 verses. Below are the shortest verses in which the root's most frequent words occur, with the word marked. The text is the Uthmani text of Tanzil, and each reference opens the verse on quran.com with translations.

أَمْر (amr), 166 times

وَيَسِّرْ لِىٓ أَمْرِى
Quran 20:26; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "my task"

فَٱلْمُقَسِّمَٰتِ أَمْرًا
Quran 51:4; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "command"

فَٱلْمُدَبِّرَٰتِ أَمْرًا
Quran 79:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) matter"

أَمَرَ (amara), 77 times

أَوْ أَمَرَ بِٱلتَّقْوَىٰٓ
Quran 96:12; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he enjoins"

كَلَّا لَمَّا يَقْضِ مَآ أَمَرَهُۥ
Quran 80:23; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he commanded him"

يَأْتَمِرُ (yaʾtamiru), 2 times

وَجَآءَ رَجُلٌ مِّنْ أَقْصَا ٱلْمَدِينَةِ يَسْعَىٰ قَالَ يَٰمُوسَىٰٓ إِنَّ ٱلْمَلَأَ يَأْتَمِرُونَ بِكَ لِيَقْتُلُوكَ فَٱخْرُجْ إِنِّى لَكَ مِنَ ٱلنَّٰصِحِينَ
Quran 28:20; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "are taking counsel"

أَسْكِنُوهُنَّ مِنْ حَيْثُ سَكَنتُم مِّن وُجْدِكُمْ وَلَا تُضَآرُّوهُنَّ لِتُضَيِّقُوا۟ عَلَيْهِنَّ ۚ وَإِن كُنَّ أُو۟لَٰتِ حَمْلٍ فَأَنفِقُوا۟ عَلَيْهِنَّ حَتَّىٰ يَضَعْنَ حَمْلَهُنَّ ۚ فَإِنْ أَرْضَعْنَ لَكُمْ فَـَٔاتُوهُنَّ أُجُورَهُنَّ ۖ وَأْتَمِرُوا۟ بَيْنَكُم بِمَعْرُوفٍ ۖ وَإِن تَعَاسَرْتُمْ فَسَتُرْضِعُ لَهُۥٓ أُخْرَىٰ
Quran 65:6; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and consult"

Learning the words of ʾ-m-r

أَمْر (amr), no. 63 with 166, is on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts it the same way. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I and VIII), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how أَمَرَ changes for person and tense. The root ʾ-m-r is one of the 1,642 roots you can search in our Quran root word explorer; for the rest of the language, see our Arabic learning resources by level.

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