ع ل م (ʿ-l-m): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root ʿ-l-m

The Arabic root ع ل م (ʿ-l-m) occurs 854 times in the Quran, in 14 different words, and is number 6 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is عَلِمَ (ʿalima), 382 times, followed by عَلِيم (ʿalīm), 163 times.

What the root ʿ-l-m means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb عَلِمَ (ʿalima) as "to know". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: عَلَّمَ (ʿallama), form II, "to teach" and يَتَعَلَّمُ (yataʿallamu), form V, "to learn".

All three letters of ʿ-l-m, ع ل م, 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 عَلِمَ (ʿalima) and عَلِيم (ʿalīm) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root ʿ-l-m in the Quran

The Quran builds 14 different words on ʿ-l-m. 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 425 of the 854 occurrences, in forms I, II and V; 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 عَٰلَمِين (ʿālamīn) 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 854, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for ʿ-l-m, and all of them match.

The root ʿ-l-m in the verses of the Quran

Words from ʿ-l-m appear in 728 verses spread over 85 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 76 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.

عَلِمَ (ʿalima), 382 times

كَلَّا سَيَعْلَمُونَ
Quran 78:4; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(soon) they will know"

ثُمَّ كَلَّا سَيَعْلَمُونَ
Quran 78:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(soon) they will know"

كَلَّا سَوْفَ تَعْلَمُونَ
Quran 102:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you will know"

عَلِيم (ʿalīm), 163 times

يَأْتُوكَ بِكُلِّ سَٰحِرٍ عَلِيمٍ
Quran 7:112; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "learned magician"

إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلْعَلِيمُ
Quran 26:220; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the all knower"

عِلْم (ʿilm), 105 times

أَعِندَهُۥ عِلْمُ ٱلْغَيْبِ فَهُوَ يَرَىٰٓ
Quran 53:35; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) knowledge"

كَلَّا لَوْ تَعْلَمُونَ عِلْمَ ٱلْيَقِينِ
Quran 102:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(with) a knowledge"

Names of God from the root ʿ-l-m

One of the 99 names of God in the enumeration of at-Tirmidhi is built on ʿ-l-m. Our table of the 99 names of Allah with their roots lists all of them, each with an everyday word from the same root.

• 19. الْعَلِيمُ Al-ʿAlim, The All-Knowing

Learning the words of ʿ-l-m

عَلِمَ (ʿalima), no. 25 with 382 and عَلِيم (ʿalīm), no. 66 with 163, 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, II and V), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how عَلِمَ changes for person and tense. Every person and tense of these verbs is set out in our conjugation tables for ʿalima, ʿallama and yataʿallamu. The root ʿ-l-m 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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