ك ت ب (k-t-b): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root k-t-b

The Arabic root ك ت ب (k-t-b) occurs 319 times in the Quran, in 7 different words, and is number 23 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is كِتَٰب (kitāb), 260 times, followed by كَتَبَ (kataba), 49 times.

What the root k-t-b means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb كَتَبَ (kataba) as "to write, to prescribe, to ordain". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: كَاتِبُ (kātibu), form III, "to give writing" and ٱكْتَتَبَ (iktataba), form VIII, "to write". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, كِتَٰب (kitāb) is most often rendered "a book".

All three letters of k-t-b, ك ت ب, 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 كِتَٰب (kitāb) and كَتَبَ (kataba) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root k-t-b in the Quran

The Quran builds 7 different words on k-t-b. 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 51 of the 319 occurrences, in forms I, III 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 كِتَٰب (kitāb) 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 7 counts, and the root total of 319, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for k-t-b, and all of them match.

The root k-t-b in the verses of the Quran

Words from k-t-b appear in 279 verses spread over 61 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 34 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.

كِتَٰب (kitāb), 260 times

كِتَٰبٌ مَّرْقُومٌ
Quran 83:9; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a book"

وَكِتَٰبٍ مَّسْطُورٍ
Quran 52:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and by (the) book"

وَٱلْكِتَٰبِ ٱلْمُبِينِ
Quran 43:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "by the book"

كَتَبَ (kataba), 49 times

أَمْ عِندَهُمُ ٱلْغَيْبُ فَهُمْ يَكْتُبُونَ
Quran 52:41; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "write (it) down"

كَلَّا ۚ سَنَكْتُبُ مَا يَقُولُ وَنَمُدُّ لَهُۥ مِنَ ٱلْعَذَابِ مَدًّا
Quran 19:79; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "we will record"

كَاتِب (kātib), 6 times

كِرَامًا كَٰتِبِينَ
Quran 82:11; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "recording"

فَمَن يَعْمَلْ مِنَ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتِ وَهُوَ مُؤْمِنٌ فَلَا كُفْرَانَ لِسَعْيِهِۦ وَإِنَّا لَهُۥ كَٰتِبُونَ
Quran 21:94; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(are) recorders"

Learning the words of k-t-b

كِتَٰب (kitāb), no. 46 with 260, 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 I, III and VIII), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how كَتَبَ changes for person and tense. Our full conjugation of kataba sets out every person and tense of كَتَبَ. The root k-t-b 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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