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

Quran Root Words > Root q-w-m

The Arabic root ق و م (q-w-m) occurs 660 times in the Quran, in 22 different words, and is number 7 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is قَوْم (qawm), 383 times, followed by قِيَٰمَة (qiyāma), 70 times.

What the root q-w-m means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb قَامَ (qāma) as "to stand up, to rise, to establish". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: أَقَامَ (aqāma), form IV, "to establish" and ٱسْتَقَٰمُ (istaqāmu), form X, "to be upright, to be straight, to stand firm". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, قَوْم (qawm) is most often rendered "a people".

The middle letter of q-w-m 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 قَوْم (qawm) and قِيَٰمَة (qiyāma).

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

The Quran builds 22 different words on q-w-m. 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 97 of the 660 occurrences, in forms I, IV and X; 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 قِيَٰمَة (qiyāma) 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 22 counts, and the root total of 660, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for q-w-m, and all of them match.

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

Words from q-w-m appear in 597 verses spread over 79 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 7 has the most of them, 47 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.

قَوْم (qawm), 383 times

كَذَّبَتْ قَوْمُ لُوطٍۭ بِٱلنُّذُرِ
Quran 54:33; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) people"

قَالَ إِنَّكُمْ قَوْمٌ مُّنكَرُونَ
Quran 15:62; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(are) a people"

قَوْمَ فِرْعَوْنَ ۚ أَلَا يَتَّقُونَ
Quran 26:11; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) people"

قِيَٰمَة (qiyāma), 70 times

يَسْـَٔلُ أَيَّانَ يَوْمُ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ
Quran 75:6; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(of) the resurrection"

ثُمَّ إِنَّكُمْ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ تُبْعَثُونَ
Quran 23:16; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(of) the resurrection"

أَقَامَ (aqāma), 54 times

ٱلَّذِينَ يُقِيمُونَ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَمِمَّا رَزَقْنَٰهُمْ يُنفِقُونَ
Quran 8:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "establish"

وَأَقِيمُوا۟ ٱلْوَزْنَ بِٱلْقِسْطِ وَلَا تُخْسِرُوا۟ ٱلْمِيزَانَ
Quran 55:9; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and establish"

Names of God from the root q-w-m

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

• 63. الْقَيُّومُ Al-Qayyum, The Self-Subsisting

Learning the words of q-w-m

قَوْم (qawm), no. 24 with 383, 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, IV and X), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how أَقَامَ changes for person and tense. Our full conjugation of qāma sets out every person and tense of قَامَ. The root q-w-m 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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