ع ب د (ʿ-b-d): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root ʿ-b-d

The Arabic root ع ب د (ʿ-b-d) occurs 275 times in the Quran, in 6 different words, and is number 33 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is عَبْد (ʿabd), 131 times, followed by عَبَدَ (ʿabada), 122 times.

What the root ʿ-b-d means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb عَبَدَ (ʿabada) as "to worship". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: عَبَّد (ʿabbad), form II, "to enslave". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, عَبْد (ʿabd) is most often rendered "slaves".

All three letters of ʿ-b-d, ع ب د, are consonants with no weak letter among them, and every word the Quran builds on the root keeps all three in the same order. In عَبْد (ʿabd) and عَبَدَ (ʿabada) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root ʿ-b-d in the Quran

The Quran builds 6 different words on ʿ-b-d. 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 123 of the 275 occurrences, in forms I and II; 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. The Arabic is the corpus's, in the Quran's own spelling, so عَٰبِدَٰت (ʿābidāt) 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 6 counts, and the root total of 275, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for ʿ-b-d, and all of them match.

The root ʿ-b-d in the verses of the Quran

Words from ʿ-b-d appear in 251 verses spread over 57 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 37 has the most of them, 14 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.

عَبْد (ʿabd), 131 times

عَبْدًا إِذَا صَلَّىٰٓ
Quran 96:10; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a slave"

فَٱدْخُلِى فِى عِبَٰدِى
Quran 89:29; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "my slaves"

إِلَّا عِبَادَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلْمُخْلَصِينَ
Quran 37:40; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) slaves"

عَبَدَ (ʿabada), 122 times

فَإِنَّكُمْ وَمَا تَعْبُدُونَ
Quran 37:161; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you worship"

لَآ أَعْبُدُ مَا تَعْبُدُونَ
Quran 109:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "i worship"

عَابِد (ʿābid), 11 times

وَلَآ أَنَا۠ عَابِدٌ مَّا عَبَدتُّمْ
Quran 109:4; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a worshipper"

وَلَآ أَنتُمْ عَٰبِدُونَ مَآ أَعْبُدُ
Quran 109:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(are) worshippers"

Learning the words of ʿ-b-d

عَبْد (ʿabd), no. 83 with 131 and عَبَدَ (ʿabada), no. 91 with 122, 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 II), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how عَبَدَ changes for person and tense. The root ʿ-b-d 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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