أ ت ي (ʾ-t-y): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root ʾ-t-y

The Arabic root أ ت ي (ʾ-t-y) occurs 549 times in the Quran, in 6 different words, and is number 8 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is آتَى (ātā), 271 times, followed by أَتَى (atā), 264 times.

What the root ʾ-t-y means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb أَتَى (atā) as "to come, to bring". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: آتَى (ātā), form IV, "to give".

The last letter of ʾ-t-y is the weak letter ي. In a root like this, called defective, the last letter often becomes a long vowel or drops away at the end of a word. Compare the root's words آتَى (ātā) and إِيتَاءٌ (ītāʾun).

One letter of ʾ-t-y 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 أَتَى (atā) and إِيتَاءٌ (ītāʾun) do.

Every word from the root ʾ-t-y in the Quran

The Quran builds 6 different words on ʾ-t-y. 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 make up 535 of the root's 549 occurrences, in forms I and IV.

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 549, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for ʾ-t-y, and all of them match.

The root ʾ-t-y in the verses of the Quran

Words from ʾ-t-y appear in 486 verses spread over 72 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 44 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.

آتَى (ātā), 271 times

ٱلَّذِى يُؤْتِى مَالَهُۥ يَتَزَكَّىٰ
Quran 92:18; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "gives"

قَالَ قَدْ أُوتِيتَ سُؤْلَكَ يَٰمُوسَىٰ
Quran 20:36; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you are granted"

وَءَاتَيْنَٰهُمَا ٱلْكِتَٰبَ ٱلْمُسْتَبِينَ
Quran 37:117; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and we gave both of them"

أَتَى (atā), 264 times

حَتَّىٰٓ أَتَىٰنَا ٱلْيَقِينُ
Quran 74:47; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "came to us"

هَلْ أَتَىٰكَ حَدِيثُ مُوسَىٰٓ
Quran 79:15; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(there) come to you"

آتِي (ātī), 9 times

وَكُلُّهُمْ ءَاتِيهِ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ فَرْدًا
Quran 19:95; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(will) come (to) him"

إِن كُلُّ مَن فِى ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ إِلَّآ ءَاتِى ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ عَبْدًا
Quran 19:93; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(will) come"

Learning the words of ʾ-t-y

آتَى (ātā), no. 42 with 271 and أَتَى (atā), no. 45 with 264, are on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts them the same way. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I and IV), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how آتَى changes for person and tense. Our full conjugation of atā sets out every person and tense of أَتَى. The root ʾ-t-y 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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