ر ح م (r-h-m): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root r-h-m

The Arabic root ر ح م (r-h-m) occurs 339 times in the Quran, in 9 different words, and is number 21 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is رَحِيم (raḥīm), 116 times, followed by رَحْمَة (raḥma), 114 times.

What the root r-h-m means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb رَحِمَ (raḥima) as "to have mercy". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, رَحِيم (raḥīm) is most often rendered "most merciful".

All three letters of r-h-m, ر ح م, 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 رَحِيم (raḥīm) and رَحْمَة (raḥma) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root r-h-m in the Quran

The Quran builds 9 different words on r-h-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. One verb, رَحِمَ (raḥima), accounts for 28 of the root's 339 occurrences; 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 رَحْمَٰن (raḥmān) 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 9 counts, and the root total of 339, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for r-h-m, and all of them match.

The root r-h-m in the verses of the Quran

Words from r-h-m appear in 313 verses spread over 62 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 19 has the most of them, 20 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.

رَحِيم (raḥīm), 116 times

ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
Quran 1:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the most merciful"

نُزُلًا مِّنْ غَفُورٍ رَّحِيمٍ
Quran 41:32; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) most merciful"

تَنزِيلَ ٱلْعَزِيزِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
Quran 36:5; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the most merciful"

رَحْمَة (raḥma), 114 times

هُدًى وَرَحْمَةً لِّلْمُحْسِنِينَ
Quran 31:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and a mercy"

ذِكْرُ رَحْمَتِ رَبِّكَ عَبْدَهُۥ زَكَرِيَّآ
Quran 19:2; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(of the) mercy"

رَحْمَٰن (raḥmān), 57 times

بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
Quran 1:1; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the most gracious"

أَن دَعَوْا۟ لِلرَّحْمَٰنِ وَلَدًا
Quran 19:91; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "to the most gracious"

Names of God from the root r-h-m

2 of the 99 names of God in the enumeration of at-Tirmidhi are built on r-h-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.

• 1. الرَّحْمَٰنُ Ar-Rahman, The Most Gracious
• 2. الرَّحِيمُ Ar-Rahim, The Most Merciful

Learning the words of r-h-m

رَحِيم (raḥīm), no. 94 with 116 and رَحْمَة (raḥma), no. 96 with 114, are on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts them the same way. Its verb follows the pattern of form I, and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how رَحِمَ changes for person and tense. The root r-h-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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