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

Quran Root Words > Root s-m-w

The Arabic root س م و (s-m-w) occurs 381 times in the Quran, in 6 different words, and is number 16 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is سَمَآء (samāʾ), 310 times, followed by ٱسْم (ism), 39 times.

What the root s-m-w means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form II verb سَمَّىٰ (sammā) as "to name". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, سَمَآء (samāʾ) is most often rendered "heavens".

The last letter of s-m-w is the weak letter و. 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 سَمَآء (samāʾ) and ٱسْم (ism).

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

The Quran builds 6 different words on s-m-w. 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, سَمَّىٰ (sammā), accounts for 8 of the root's 381 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 سَمَّىٰ (sammā) 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 6 counts, and the root total of 381, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for s-m-w, and all of them match.

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

Words from s-m-w appear in 352 verses spread over 81 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 6 has the most of them, 18 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.

سَمَآء (samāʾ), 310 times

وَٱلسَّمَآءِ ذَاتِ ٱلْحُبُكِ
Quran 51:7; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "by the heaven"

وَإِذَا ٱلسَّمَآءُ فُرِجَتْ
Quran 77:9; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the heaven"

وَإِذَا ٱلسَّمَآءُ كُشِطَتْ
Quran 81:11; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the sky"

ٱسْم (ism), 39 times

وَذَكَرَ ٱسْمَ رَبِّهِۦ فَصَلَّىٰ
Quran 87:15; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) name"

فَسَبِّحْ بِٱسْمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلْعَظِيمِ
Quran 56:74; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) name"

مُسَمًّى (musamman), 21 times

وَلَوْلَا كَلِمَةٌ سَبَقَتْ مِن رَّبِّكَ لَكَانَ لِزَامًا وَأَجَلٌ مُّسَمًّى
Quran 20:129; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "determined"

لَكُمْ فِيهَا مَنَٰفِعُ إِلَىٰٓ أَجَلٍ مُّسَمًّى ثُمَّ مَحِلُّهَآ إِلَى ٱلْبَيْتِ ٱلْعَتِيقِ
Quran 22:33; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "appointed;"

Learning the words of s-m-w

سَمَآء (samāʾ), no. 34 with 310, is on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts it the same way. Its verb follows the pattern of form II, and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how سَمَّىٰ changes for person and tense. The root s-m-w 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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