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

Quran Root Words > Root n-f-s

The Arabic root ن ف س (n-f-s) occurs 298 times in the Quran, in 4 different words, and is number 26 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is نَفْس (nafs), 295 times, followed by مُتَنَٰفِسُون (mutanāfisūn), once.

What the root n-f-s means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form V verb تَنَفَّسَ (tanaffasa) as "to breathe". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: يَتَنَافَسِ (yatanāfasi), form VI, "to aspire". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, نَفْس (nafs) is most often rendered "soul".

All three letters of n-f-s, ن ف س, 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 نَفْس (nafs) and مُتَنَٰفِسُون (mutanāfisūn) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

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

The Quran builds 4 different words on n-f-s. 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 2 of the 298 occurrences, in forms V and VI; 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 مُتَنَٰفِسُون (mutanāfisūn) 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 4 counts, and the root total of 298, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for n-f-s, and all of them match.

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

Words from n-f-s appear in 270 verses spread over 63 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 30 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.

نَفْس (nafs), 295 times

وَٱصْطَنَعْتُكَ لِنَفْسِى
Quran 20:41; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "for myself"

وَنَفْسٍ وَمَا سَوَّىٰهَا
Quran 91:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and (the) soul"

وَإِذَا ٱلنُّفُوسُ زُوِّجَتْ
Quran 81:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the souls"

مُتَنَٰفِسُون (mutanāfisūn), once

خِتَٰمُهُۥ مِسْكٌ ۚ وَفِى ذَٰلِكَ فَلْيَتَنَافَسِ ٱلْمُتَنَٰفِسُونَ
Quran 83:26; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the aspirers"

تَنَفَّسَ (tanaffasa), once

وَٱلصُّبْحِ إِذَا تَنَفَّسَ
Quran 81:18; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "it breathes"

Learning the words of n-f-s

نَفْس (nafs), no. 36 with 295, 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 VI), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how تَنَفَّسَ changes for person and tense. The root n-f-s 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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