و ل ي (w-l-y): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root w-l-y

The Arabic root و ل ي (w-l-y) occurs 232 times in the Quran, in 12 different words, and is number 42 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is وَلِىّ (waliyy), 86 times, followed by تَوَلَّىٰ (tawallā), 78 times.

What the root w-l-y means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb يَلُ (yalu) as "to be close". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: تَوَلَّىٰ (tawallā), form V, "to turn" and وَلَّىٰ (wallā), form II, "to turn". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, وَلِىّ (waliyy) is most often rendered "allies".

The last letter of w-l-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 وَلِىّ (waliyy) and تَوَلَّىٰ (tawallā).

The first letter of w-l-y is the weak letter و. In a root like this, called assimilated, the first letter drops out of the present tense of many form I verbs and merges into the t of form VIII. Compare the root's words وَلِىّ (waliyy) and مَوْلَىٰ (mawlā).

Every word from the root w-l-y in the Quran

The Quran builds 12 different words on w-l-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 account for 109 of the 232 occurrences, in forms I, II and V; 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 تَوَلَّىٰ (tawallā) 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 12 counts, and the root total of 232, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for w-l-y, and all of them match.

The root w-l-y in the verses of the Quran

Words from w-l-y appear in 202 verses spread over 55 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 17 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.

وَلِىّ (waliyy), 86 times

خَٰلِدِينَ فِيهَآ أَبَدًا ۖ لَّا يَجِدُونَ وَلِيًّا وَلَا نَصِيرًا
Quran 33:65; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "any protector"

إِنَّ وَلِـِّۧىَ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى نَزَّلَ ٱلْكِتَٰبَ ۖ وَهُوَ يَتَوَلَّى ٱلصَّٰلِحِينَ
Quran 7:196; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "my protector"

أَلَآ إِنَّ أَوْلِيَآءَ ٱللَّهِ لَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ
Quran 10:62; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "(the) friends of Allah"

تَوَلَّىٰ (tawallā), 78 times

ٱلَّذِى كَذَّبَ وَتَوَلَّىٰ
Quran 92:16; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and turned away"

وَلَٰكِن كَذَّبَ وَتَوَلَّىٰ
Quran 75:32; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and turned away"

وَلَّىٰ (wallā), 30 times

سَيُهْزَمُ ٱلْجَمْعُ وَيُوَلُّونَ ٱلدُّبُرَ
Quran 54:45; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "and they will turn"

وَتَٱللَّهِ لَأَكِيدَنَّ أَصْنَٰمَكُم بَعْدَ أَن تُوَلُّوا۟ مُدْبِرِينَ
Quran 21:57; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "you go away"

Names of God from the root w-l-y

2 of the 99 names of God in the enumeration of at-Tirmidhi are built on w-l-y. Our table of the 99 names of Allah with their roots lists all of them, each with an everyday word from the same root.

• 55. الْوَلِيُّ Al-Wali, The Protecting Friend
• 77. الْوَالِي Al-Wali, The Patron

Learning the words of w-l-y

None of its words is among the hundred on our list of the most common Quran words. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I, II and V), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how تَوَلَّىٰ changes for person and tense. The root w-l-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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