ح ك م (h-k-m): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root h-k-m

The Arabic root ح ك م (h-k-m) occurs 210 times in the Quran, in 13 different words, and is number 44 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is حَكِيم (ḥakīm), 97 times, followed by حَكَمَ (ḥakama), 45 times.

What the root h-k-m means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb حَكَمَ (ḥakama) as "to judge". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: أُحْكِمَتْ (uḥkimat), form IV, "to perfect, to establish", يُحَكِّمُ (yuḥakkimu), form II, "to make judge" and يَتَحَاكَمُ (yataḥākamu), form VI, "to judge". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, حَكِيم (ḥakīm) is most often rendered "all wise".

All three letters of h-k-m, ح ك 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 حَكِيم (ḥakīm) and حَكَمَ (ḥakama) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root h-k-m in the Quran

The Quran builds 13 different words on h-k-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 50 of the 210 occurrences, in forms I, II, IV and VI; 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 حَٰكِمِين (ḥākimīn) 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 13 counts, and the root total of 210, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for h-k-m, and all of them match.

The root h-k-m in the verses of the Quran

Words from h-k-m appear in 189 verses spread over 57 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 4 has the most of them, 20 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.

حَكِيم (ḥakīm), 97 times

وَٱلْقُرْءَانِ ٱلْحَكِيمِ
Quran 36:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the wise"

تِلْكَ ءَايَٰتُ ٱلْكِتَٰبِ ٱلْحَكِيمِ
Quran 31:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the wise"

فِيهَا يُفْرَقُ كُلُّ أَمْرٍ حَكِيمٍ
Quran 44:4; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "wise"

حَكَمَ (ḥakama), 45 times

مَا لَكُمْ كَيْفَ تَحْكُمُونَ
Quran 37:154; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you judge"

قَٰلَ رَبِّ ٱحْكُم بِٱلْحَقِّ ۗ وَرَبُّنَا ٱلرَّحْمَٰنُ ٱلْمُسْتَعَانُ عَلَىٰ مَا تَصِفُونَ
Quran 21:112; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "judge"

حُكْم (ḥukm), 30 times

رَبِّ هَبْ لِى حُكْمًا وَأَلْحِقْنِى بِٱلصَّٰلِحِينَ
Quran 26:83; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "wisdom"

يَٰيَحْيَىٰ خُذِ ٱلْكِتَٰبَ بِقُوَّةٍ ۖ وَءَاتَيْنَٰهُ ٱلْحُكْمَ صَبِيًّا
Quran 19:12; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "[the] wisdom"

Names of God from the root h-k-m

2 of the 99 names of God in the enumeration of at-Tirmidhi are built on h-k-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.

• 28. الْحَكَمُ Al-Hakam, The Judge
• 46. الْحَكِيمُ Al-Hakim, The All-Wise

Learning the words of h-k-m

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, IV and VI), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how حَكَمَ changes for person and tense. The root h-k-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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