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

Quran Root Words > Root q-w-l

The Arabic root ق و ل (q-w-l) occurs 1,722 times in the Quran, in 6 different words, and is number 2 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is قَالَ (qāla), 1,618 times, followed by قَوْل (qawl), 92 times.

What the root q-w-l means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb قَالَ (qāla) as "to say". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: تَقَوَّلَ (taqawwala), form V, "to fabricate, to make up".

The middle letter of q-w-l is the weak letter و. 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 قَالَ (qāla) and قَوْل (qawl).

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

The Quran builds 6 different words on q-w-l. 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 1,620 of the root's 1,722 occurrences, in forms I and V.

Meanings in quotation marks are MASAQ word-by-word glosses, the others the corpus dictionary's, and the word types follow the dictionary. Every count on this page is a lemma count from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, version 0.4. We compared each of these 6 counts, and the root total of 1,722, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for q-w-l, and all of them match.

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

Words from q-w-l appear in 1,383 verses spread over 84 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 7 has the most of them, 87 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.

قَالَ (qāla), 1,618 times

وَقِيلَ مَنْ ۜ رَاقٍ
Quran 75:27; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and it is said"

فَقَالَ إِنِّى سَقِيمٌ
Quran 37:89; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and he said"

قُلْ هُوَ نَبَؤٌا۟ عَظِيمٌ
Quran 38:67; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "say"

قَوْل (qawl), 92 times

يَفْقَهُوا۟ قَوْلِى
Quran 20:28; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "my speech"

إِنَّهُۥ لَقَوْلٌ فَصْلٌ
Quran 86:13; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(is) surely a word"

قَآئِل (qāʾil), 5 times

قَالَ قَآئِلٌ مِّنْهُمْ إِنِّى كَانَ لِى قَرِينٌ
Quran 37:51; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a speaker"

۞ قَدْ يَعْلَمُ ٱللَّهُ ٱلْمُعَوِّقِينَ مِنكُمْ وَٱلْقَآئِلِينَ لِإِخْوَٰنِهِمْ هَلُمَّ إِلَيْنَا ۖ وَلَا يَأْتُونَ ٱلْبَأْسَ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا
Quran 33:18; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and those who say"

Learning the words of q-w-l

قَالَ (qāla), no. 7 with 1,618, 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 and V), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how قَالَ changes for person and tense. Our full conjugation of qāla sets out every person and tense of قَالَ. The root q-w-l 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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