خ ي ر (kh-y-r): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root kh-y-r

The Arabic root خ ي ر (kh-y-r) occurs 196 times in the Quran, in 5 different words, and is number 48 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is خَيْر (khayr), 178 times, followed by خَيْرَٰت (khayrāt), 10 times.

What the root kh-y-r means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form VIII verb ٱخْتَارَ (ikhtāra) as "to choose". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: يَتَخَيَّرُ (yatakhayyaru), form V, "to select, to choose". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, خَيْر (khayr) is most often rendered "better".

The middle letter of kh-y-r is the weak letter ي. In a root like this, called hollow, the middle letter is often not written as a consonant and turns into a long vowel instead. Compare the root's words خَيْر (khayr) and خَيْرَٰت (khayrāt).

Every word from the root kh-y-r in the Quran

The Quran builds 5 different words on kh-y-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 account for 6 of the 196 occurrences, in forms V and VIII; 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 خَيْرَٰت (khayrāt) 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 5 counts, and the root total of 196, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for kh-y-r, and all of them match.

The root kh-y-r in the verses of the Quran

Words from kh-y-r appear in 178 verses spread over 55 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 21 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.

خَيْر (khayr), 178 times

وَإِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلْخَيْرُ مَنُوعًا
Quran 70:21; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the good"

وَإِنَّهُۥ لِحُبِّ ٱلْخَيْرِ لَشَدِيدٌ
Quran 100:8; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(of) wealth"

مَّنَّاعٍ لِّلْخَيْرِ مُعْتَدٍ مُّرِيبٍ
Quran 50:25; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "of good"

خَيْرَٰت (khayrāt), 10 times

فِيهِنَّ خَيْرَٰتٌ حِسَانٌ
Quran 55:70; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(are) good"

نُسَارِعُ لَهُمْ فِى ٱلْخَيْرَٰتِ ۚ بَل لَّا يَشْعُرُونَ
Quran 23:56; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the good"

ٱخْتَارَ (ikhtāra), 4 times

وَأَنَا ٱخْتَرْتُكَ فَٱسْتَمِعْ لِمَا يُوحَىٰٓ
Quran 20:13; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(have) chosen you"

وَلَقَدِ ٱخْتَرْنَٰهُمْ عَلَىٰ عِلْمٍ عَلَى ٱلْعَٰلَمِينَ
Quran 44:32; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "we chose them"

Learning the words of kh-y-r

خَيْر (khayr), no. 58 with 178, 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 V and VIII), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how ٱخْتَارَ changes for person and tense. The root kh-y-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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