ر س ل (r-s-l): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root r-s-l

The Arabic root ر س ل (r-s-l) occurs 513 times in the Quran, in 8 different words, and is number 12 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is رَسُول (rasūl), 332 times, followed by أَرْسَلَ (arsala), 130 times.

What the root r-s-l means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form IV verb أَرْسَلَ (arsala) as "to send". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, رَسُول (rasūl) is most often rendered "a messenger".

All three letters of r-s-l, ر س ل, 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 رَسُول (rasūl) and أَرْسَلَ (arsala) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root r-s-l in the Quran

The Quran builds 8 different words on r-s-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. One verb, أَرْسَلَ (arsala), accounts for 130 of the root's 513 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 رِسَٰلَٰت (risālāt) 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 8 counts, and the root total of 513, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for r-s-l, and all of them match.

The root r-s-l in the verses of the Quran

Words from r-s-l appear in 429 verses spread over 69 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 9 has the most of them, 32 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.

رَسُول (rasūl), 332 times

وَإِذَا ٱلرُّسُلُ أُقِّتَتْ
Quran 77:11; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the messengers"

إِنِّى لَكُمْ رَسُولٌ أَمِينٌ
Quran 26:107; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "a messenger"

إِنَّهُۥ لَقَوْلُ رَسُولٍ كَرِيمٍ
Quran 69:40; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(of) a messenger"

أَرْسَلَ (arsala), 130 times

أَنْ أَرْسِلْ مَعَنَا بَنِىٓ إِسْرَٰٓءِيلَ
Quran 26:17; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "send"

وَمَآ أُرْسِلُوا۟ عَلَيْهِمْ حَٰفِظِينَ
Quran 83:33; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "they had been sent"

مُرْسَل (mursal), 35 times

إِنَّكَ لَمِنَ ٱلْمُرْسَلِينَ
Quran 36:3; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the messengers"

كَذَّبَتْ عَادٌ ٱلْمُرْسَلِينَ
Quran 26:123; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the messengers"

Learning the words of r-s-l

رَسُول (rasūl), no. 32 with 332 and أَرْسَلَ (arsala), no. 84 with 130, are on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts them the same way. Its verb follows the pattern of form IV, and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how أَرْسَلَ changes for person and tense. The root r-s-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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