خ ل ق (kh-l-q): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root kh-l-q

The Arabic root خ ل ق (kh-l-q) occurs 261 times in the Quran, in 8 different words, and is number 35 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is خَلَقَ (khalaqa), 184 times, followed by خَلْق (khalq), 52 times.

What the root kh-l-q means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb خَلَقَ (khalaqa) as "to create".

All three letters of kh-l-q, خ ل ق, 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 خَلَقَ (khalaqa) and خَلْق (khalq) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root kh-l-q in the Quran

The Quran builds 8 different words on kh-l-q. 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. One verb, خَلَقَ (khalaqa), accounts for 184 of the root's 261 occurrences.

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 خَٰلِق (khāliq) 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 8 counts, and the root total of 261, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for kh-l-q, and all of them match.

The root kh-l-q in the verses of the Quran

Words from kh-l-q appear in 218 verses spread over 75 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 16 has the most of them, 9 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.

خَلَقَ (khalaqa), 184 times

خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ
Quran 55:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he created"

مِن شَرِّ مَا خَلَقَ
Quran 113:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he created"

ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ فَسَوَّىٰ
Quran 87:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "created"

خَلْق (khalq), 52 times

إِن يَشَأْ يُذْهِبْكُمْ وَيَأْتِ بِخَلْقٍ جَدِيدٍ
Quran 35:16; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "in a creation"

ءَأَنتُمْ أَشَدُّ خَلْقًا أَمِ ٱلسَّمَآءُ ۚ بَنَىٰهَا
Quran 79:27; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "creation"

خَٰلِق (khāliq), 12 times

ءَأَنتُمْ تَخْلُقُونَهُۥٓ أَمْ نَحْنُ ٱلْخَٰلِقُونَ
Quran 56:59; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the creators"

أَمْ خُلِقُوا۟ مِنْ غَيْرِ شَىْءٍ أَمْ هُمُ ٱلْخَٰلِقُونَ
Quran 52:35; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the creators"

Names of God from the root kh-l-q

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

• 11. الْخَالِقُ Al-Khaliq, The Creator

Learning the words of kh-l-q

خَلَقَ (khalaqa), no. 56 with 184, is on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts it the same way. Its verb follows the pattern of form I, and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how خَلَقَ changes for person and tense. The root kh-l-q 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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