ح س ن (h-s-n): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root h-s-n

The Arabic root ح س ن (h-s-n) occurs 194 times in the Quran, in 12 different words, and is number 49 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is مُحْسِن (muḥsin), 38 times, followed by أَحْسَن (aḥsan), 36 times.

What the root h-s-n means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb حَسُنَ (ḥasuna) as "to be the best, to be good". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: أَحْسَنَ (aḥsana), form IV, "to do good". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, مُحْسِن (muḥsin) is most often rendered "a good doer".

All three letters of h-s-n, ح س ن, 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 مُحْسِن (muḥsin) and أَحْسَن (aḥsan) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root h-s-n in the Quran

The Quran builds 12 different words on h-s-n. 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 24 of the 194 occurrences, in forms I and IV; 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 حُسْنَىٰ (ḥusnā) 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 194, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for h-s-n, and all of them match.

The root h-s-n in the verses of the Quran

Words from h-s-n appear in 177 verses spread over 50 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 4 has the most of them, 12 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.

مُحْسِن (muḥsin), 38 times

كَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِى ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ
Quran 37:110; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the good doers"

هُدًى وَرَحْمَةً لِّلْمُحْسِنِينَ
Quran 31:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "for the good doers"

إِنَّا كَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِى ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ
Quran 37:80; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the good doers"

أَحْسَن (aḥsan), 36 times

لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ فِىٓ أَحْسَنِ تَقْوِيمٍ
Quran 95:4; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) best"

أَتَدْعُونَ بَعْلًا وَتَذَرُونَ أَحْسَنَ ٱلْخَٰلِقِينَ
Quran 37:125; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) best"

حَسَنَة (ḥasana), 28 times

مَن جَآءَ بِٱلْحَسَنَةِ فَلَهُۥ خَيْرٌ مِّنْهَا وَهُم مِّن فَزَعٍ يَوْمَئِذٍ ءَامِنُونَ
Quran 27:89; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "with the good"

إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يَظْلِمُ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ ۖ وَإِن تَكُ حَسَنَةً يُضَٰعِفْهَا وَيُؤْتِ مِن لَّدُنْهُ أَجْرًا عَظِيمًا
Quran 4:40; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a good"

Learning the words of h-s-n

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