ذ ك ر (dh-k-r): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root dh-k-r

The Arabic root ذ ك ر (dh-k-r) occurs 292 times in the Quran, in 14 different words, and is number 29 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is ذَكَرَ (dhakara), 84 times, followed by ذِكْر (dhikr), 76 times.

What the root dh-k-r means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb ذَكَرَ (dhakara) as "to remember, to mention". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: تَذَكَّرَ (tadhakkara), form V, "to receive admonition", ذُكِّرَ (dhukkira), form II, "to remind" and ٱدَّكَرَ (iddakara), form VIII, "to remember".

All three letters of dh-k-r, ذ ك ر, are consonants with no weak letter among them, so most words built on the root keep all three in the same order, as ذَكَرَ (dhakara) and ذِكْر (dhikr) do. مُدَّكِر (muddakir) is an exception: in it one root letter has merged into the letter next to it.

Every word from the root dh-k-r in the Quran

The Quran builds 14 different words on dh-k-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 make up 154 of the root's 292 occurrences, in forms I, II, V and VIII.

Meanings in quotation marks are MASAQ word-by-word glosses, the others the corpus dictionary's, and the word types follow the dictionary. The Arabic is the corpus's, in the Quran's own spelling, so ذِكْرَىٰ (dhikrā) keeps its small dagger alif. Every count on this page is a lemma count from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, version 0.4. We compared each of these 14 counts, and the root total of 292, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for dh-k-r, and all of them match.

The root dh-k-r in the verses of the Quran

Words from dh-k-r appear in 264 verses spread over 71 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 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.

ذَكَرَ (dhakara), 84 times

فَمَن شَآءَ ذَكَرَهُۥ
Quran 74:55; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(may) pay heed to it"

وَنَذْكُرَكَ كَثِيرًا
Quran 20:34; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and [we] remember you"

وَذَكَرَ ٱسْمَ رَبِّهِۦ فَصَلَّىٰ
Quran 87:15; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and remembers"

ذِكْر (dhikr), 76 times

فَٱلتَّٰلِيَٰتِ ذِكْرًا
Quran 37:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) message"

فَٱلْمُلْقِيَٰتِ ذِكْرًا
Quran 77:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) reminder"

تَذَكَّرَ (tadhakkara), 51 times

أَفَلَا تَذَكَّرُونَ
Quran 37:155; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you pay heed"

سَيَذَّكَّرُ مَن يَخْشَىٰ
Quran 87:10; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he will pay heed"

Learning the words of dh-k-r

None of its words is among the hundred on our list of the most common Quran words. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I, II, V and VIII), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how ذَكَرَ changes for person and tense. The root dh-k-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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