ه د ي (h-d-y): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root h-d-y

The Arabic root ه د ي (h-d-y) occurs 316 times in the Quran, in 12 different words, and is number 24 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is هَدَى (hadā), 144 times, followed by هُدًى (hudan), 85 times.

What the root h-d-y means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb هَدَى (hadā) as "to guide". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: ٱهْتَدَىٰ (ihtadā), form VIII, "to be guided".

The last letter of h-d-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 هَدَى (hadā) and ٱهْتَدَىٰ (ihtadā).

Every word from the root h-d-y in the Quran

The Quran builds 12 different words on h-d-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 184 of the root's 316 occurrences, in forms I 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 ٱهْتَدَىٰ (ihtadā) 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 12 counts, and the root total of 316, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for h-d-y, and all of them match.

The root h-d-y in the verses of the Quran

Words from h-d-y appear in 268 verses spread over 62 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 25 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.

هَدَى (hadā), 144 times

وَٱلَّذِى قَدَّرَ فَهَدَىٰ
Quran 87:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "then guided"

وَهَدَيْنَٰهُ ٱلنَّجْدَيْنِ
Quran 90:10; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and shown him"

وَوَجَدَكَ ضَآلًّا فَهَدَىٰ
Quran 93:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "so he guided"

هُدًى (hudan), 85 times

إِنَّ عَلَيْنَا لَلْهُدَىٰ
Quran 92:12; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(is) the guidance"

هُدًى وَبُشْرَىٰ لِلْمُؤْمِنِينَ
Quran 27:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a guidance"

ٱهْتَدَىٰ (ihtadā), 40 times

وَعَلَٰمَٰتٍ ۚ وَبِٱلنَّجْمِ هُمْ يَهْتَدُونَ
Quran 16:16; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "guide themselves"

وَلَقَدْ ءَاتَيْنَا مُوسَى ٱلْكِتَٰبَ لَعَلَّهُمْ يَهْتَدُونَ
Quran 23:49; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "be guided"

Names of God from the root h-d-y

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

• 94. الْهَادِي Al-Hadi, The Guide

Learning the words of h-d-y

هَدَى (hadā), no. 75 with 144, is on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts it the same way. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I and VIII), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how هَدَى changes for person and tense. The root h-d-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.

Frequently asked questions

Keep learning Arabic

• Up one levelQuran Root Word Explorer: Every Root, Word and VerseFind the root of any Quran word: type Arabic letters, a word or a transliteration and see every derived word, its count and its verses. All 1,642 roots.
• In this topicح ك م (h-k-m): Every Word From This Root in the QuranThe root ح ك م (h-k-m) occurs 210 times in the Quran, in 13 words led by ḥakīm. Each word with its count and type, plus the shortest verses it is in.
• In this topicح ق ق (h-q-q): Every Word From This Root in the QuranThe root ح ق ق (h-q-q) occurs 287 times in the Quran, in 7 words led by ḥaqq. Each word with its count and type, plus the shortest verses it is in.
• In this topicأ ر ض (ʾ-r-d): Every Word From This Root in the QuranThe root أ ر ض (ʾ-r-d) occurs 461 times in the Quran, always as one word, arḍ. Its count, word type and meaning, plus the shortest verses it is in.