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

Quran Root Words > Root r-ʾ-y

The Arabic root ر أ ي (r-ʾ-y) occurs 328 times in the Quran, in 8 different words, and is number 22 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is رَءَا (raʾā), 271 times, followed by أَرَيْ (aray), 40 times.

What the root r-ʾ-y means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb رَءَا (raʾā) as "to see". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: أَرَيْ (aray), form IV, "to show", تَرَآءَتِ (tarāʾati), form VI, "to come in sight" and يُرَآءُ (yurāʾu), form III, "to show off".

The last letter of r-ʾ-y is the weak letter ي. In a root like this, called defective, the last letter often becomes a long vowel or drops away at the end of a word. Compare the root's words رَءَا (raʾā) and أَرَيْ (aray).

One letter of r-ʾ-y is a hamza, the glottal stop. Arabic writes a hamza on a seat chosen by the vowels around it (أ, إ, ؤ, ئ, or ء on its own), so words from a hamza root can look different from one another, as the root's words رَءَا (raʾā) and أَرَيْ (aray) do.

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

The Quran builds 8 different words on r-ʾ-y. 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 315 of the root's 328 occurrences, in forms I, III, IV and VI.

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 8 counts, and the root total of 328, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for r-ʾ-y, and all of them match.

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

Words from r-ʾ-y appear in 297 verses spread over 72 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 6 has the most of them, 15 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.

رَءَا (raʾā), 271 times

وَنَرَىٰهُ قَرِيبًا
Quran 70:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "but we see it"

لَتَرَوُنَّ ٱلْجَحِيمَ
Quran 102:6; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "surely you will see"

أَن رَّءَاهُ ٱسْتَغْنَىٰٓ
Quran 96:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "he sees himself"

أَرَيْ (aray), 40 times

لِنُرِيَكَ مِنْ ءَايَٰتِنَا ٱلْكُبْرَى
Quran 20:23; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "that we may show you"

قُل رَّبِّ إِمَّا تُرِيَنِّى مَا يُوعَدُونَ
Quran 23:93; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you should show me"

رُءْيَا (ruʾyā), 7 times

قَدْ صَدَّقْتَ ٱلرُّءْيَآ ۚ إِنَّا كَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِى ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ
Quran 37:105; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the vision"

قَالَ يَٰبُنَىَّ لَا تَقْصُصْ رُءْيَاكَ عَلَىٰٓ إِخْوَتِكَ فَيَكِيدُوا۟ لَكَ كَيْدًا ۖ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيْطَٰنَ لِلْإِنسَٰنِ عَدُوٌّ مُّبِينٌ
Quran 12:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "your vision"

Learning the words of r-ʾ-y

رَءَا (raʾā), no. 43 with 271, 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, IV and VI), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how رَءَا changes for person and tense. The root r-ʾ-y 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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