غ ف ر (gh-f-r): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root gh-f-r

The Arabic root غ ف ر (gh-f-r) occurs 234 times in the Quran, in 9 different words, and is number 41 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is غَفُور (ghafūr), 91 times, followed by غَفَرَ (ghafara), 65 times.

What the root gh-f-r means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb غَفَرَ (ghafara) as "to forgive". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: ٱسْتَغْفَرَ (istaghfara), form X, "to ask forgiveness". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, غَفُور (ghafūr) is most often rendered "oft forgiving".

All three letters of gh-f-r, غ ف ر, 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 غَفُور (ghafūr) and غَفَرَ (ghafara) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root gh-f-r in the Quran

The Quran builds 9 different words on gh-f-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 105 of the 234 occurrences, in forms I and X; 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 9 counts, and the root total of 234, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for gh-f-r, and all of them match.

The root gh-f-r in the verses of the Quran

Words from gh-f-r appear in 202 verses spread over 56 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 16 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.

غَفُور (ghafūr), 91 times

وَهُوَ ٱلْغَفُورُ ٱلْوَدُودُ
Quran 85:14; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(is) the oft forgiving"

نُزُلًا مِّنْ غَفُورٍ رَّحِيمٍ
Quran 41:32; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) oft forgiving"

فَإِنِ ٱنتَهَوْا۟ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
Quran 2:192; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(is) oft forgiving"

غَفَرَ (ghafara), 65 times

وَٱغْفِرْ لِأَبِىٓ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ مِنَ ٱلضَّآلِّينَ
Quran 26:86; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and forgive"

وَقُل رَّبِّ ٱغْفِرْ وَٱرْحَمْ وَأَنتَ خَيْرُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ
Quran 23:118; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "forgive"

ٱسْتَغْفَرَ (istaghfara), 40 times

وَبِٱلْأَسْحَارِ هُمْ يَسْتَغْفِرُونَ
Quran 51:18; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "would ask forgiveness"

فَقُلْتُ ٱسْتَغْفِرُوا۟ رَبَّكُمْ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ غَفَّارًا
Quran 71:10; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "ask forgiveness"

Names of God from the root gh-f-r

2 of the 99 names of God in the enumeration of at-Tirmidhi are built on gh-f-r. Our table of the 99 names of Allah with their roots lists all of them, each with an everyday word from the same root.

• 14. الْغَفَّارُ Al-Ghaffar, The Repeatedly Forgiving
• 34. الْغَفُورُ Al-Ghafur, The All-Forgiving

Learning the words of gh-f-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 and X), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how غَفَرَ changes for person and tense. The root gh-f-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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