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

Quran Root Words > Root k-f-r

The Arabic root ك ف ر (k-f-r) occurs 525 times in the Quran, in 14 different words, and is number 9 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is كَفَرَ (kafara), 289 times, followed by كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn), 129 times.

What the root k-f-r means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb كَفَرَ (kafara) as "to disbelieve". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: كَفَّرَ (kaffara), form II, "to remove" and أَكْفَرَ (akfara), form IV, "to be ungrateful, to deny".

All three letters of k-f-r, ك 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 كَفَرَ (kafara) and كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

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

The Quran builds 14 different words on k-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 make up 304 of the root's 525 occurrences, in forms I, II and IV.

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 كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn) 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 525, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for k-f-r, and all of them match.

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

Words from k-f-r appear in 465 verses spread over 77 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 40 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.

كَفَرَ (kafara), 289 times

إِلَّا مَن تَوَلَّىٰ وَكَفَرَ
Quran 88:23; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and disbelieves"

بَلِ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُكَذِّبُونَ
Quran 84:22; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "disbelieved"

فَكَفَرُوا۟ بِهِۦ ۖ فَسَوْفَ يَعْلَمُونَ
Quran 37:170; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "but they disbelieved"

كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn), 129 times

لِّلْكَٰفِرِينَ لَيْسَ لَهُۥ دَافِعٌ
Quran 70:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "to the disbelievers"

عَلَى ٱلْكَٰفِرِينَ غَيْرُ يَسِيرٍ
Quran 74:10; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the disbelievers"

كُفْر (kufr), 37 times

وَبِكُفْرِهِمْ وَقَوْلِهِمْ عَلَىٰ مَرْيَمَ بُهْتَٰنًا عَظِيمًا
Quran 4:156; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and for their disbelief"

مَن كَفَرَ فَعَلَيْهِ كُفْرُهُۥ ۖ وَمَنْ عَمِلَ صَٰلِحًا فَلِأَنفُسِهِمْ يَمْهَدُونَ
Quran 30:44; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(is) his disbelief"

Learning the words of k-f-r

كَفَرَ (kafara), no. 37 with 289, is on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts it the same way. The same list has كَافِر (kāfir) at no. 68 with 156 occurrences, because it counts كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn) (129 times) together with it; the corpus dictionary, and this page, keep the two apart, which gives كَافِر (kāfir) 27 times. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I, II and IV), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how كَفَرَ changes for person and tense. The root k-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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