Quran Root Word Explorer: Every Root, Word and Verse

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Most words in the Quran are built on a root of three consonants: the Quranic Arabic Corpus counts 49,968 occurrences of 1,642 roots in the Quran's 77,429 words. Type a root, a word or a transliteration below to see every word the Quran builds on that root, how often each one occurs, and the verses where it is used.

The explorer covers all 1,642 roots in the corpus. Roots, words, word types and counts come from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, version 0.4, by Kais Dukes, released under the GNU General Public License; the corpus's licence notice adds that the annotation "can be used in any website or application, provided its source (the Quranic Arabic Corpus) is clearly indicated, and a link is made to http://corpus.quran.com". The English glosses come from MASAQ (Sawalha, Yagi, Alshargi, Hammo and Alshdaifat), version 5, under CC BY 4.0; we changed them by joining hyphenated words and dropping bracketed helper words at the start. Verse text on the root pages is the Uthmani text of Tanzil, under CC BY 3.0.

How to search the roots

The box takes three kinds of input, and you never need to say which one you typed. The result is the same table every time: the root, its words from most to least frequent, each word's type and English gloss, its count, and links to the verses on quran.com.

• Root letters: كتب, ك ت ب and ك-ت-ب all find the root k-t-b. A hamza can be typed as أ, ء or a plain ا, so امن finds أ م ن (ʾ-m-n).
• A word: يؤمنون (yuʾminūn, they believe) finds أ م ن, and والكتاب (wal-kitāb, and the book) finds k-t-b. The explorer removes the short words that attach to the front of a Quranic word (wa-, fa-, bi-, li-, ka-, sa- and al-) and the pronoun endings, and accepts both the Quran's own spelling and modern print, with or without vowel marks: الصلوة and الصلاة both find the root of ṣalāt, prayer.
• A transliteration: kitab, rahma and qala find their roots, and so do root letters in Latin script: ktb, k-t-b and r-h-m. Dots and macrons are optional. When a Latin spelling fits more than one root, the explorer shows the most frequent and lists the others as buttons.

If a word is not found, type its three root letters. The word lookup uses the 8,089 spellings the corpus derives from the roots, so a rare spelling with an unusual ending can slip through, but every root is reachable by its letters.

What an Arabic root is

An Arabic root is a set of consonants, usually three, that a whole family of words shares. The words differ in their vowels and in the letters added around the root, and the root carries the common thread of meaning. From ك ت ب (k-t-b) the Quran builds seven words, among them the verb كَتَبَ (kataba), which the corpus glosses as "to write, to prescribe, to ordain", the noun كِتَٰب (kitāb, a book) and the passive participle مَكْتُوب (maktūb, written).

Learning by root pays off in the Quran because a few roots carry much of the text. Ten roots alone account for 10,933 of the 49,968 root occurrences in the corpus, 21.9 percent, and the 50 most frequent account for 22,812, or 45.7 percent. Our list of the 100 most common Quran words ranks single words; the root pages below group the same words into families, so the words you already know help with the ones you meet only once. The verbs among them follow the ten verb forms, and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form.

The 99 names of God are a compact way to see the system at work: nearly all of them are built on a root, and several share one. Our table of the 99 names of Allah with their roots pairs each name with an everyday word from the same root, and the root pages below list the names that come from each root.

The 50 most frequent roots in the Quran

The 50 roots below each occur at least 194 times, and each has its own page: every word built on it, its meaning, the shortest verses where its most frequent words occur, the names of God built on it, and its rank on our most-common-words list. The explorer above covers the other 1,592.

Where the counts come from, and how we checked them

Every count here is a lemma count from the Quranic Arabic Corpus 0.4: the dictionary word, summed over all its inflected forms, so the 1,618 occurrences of قَالَ (qāla, to say) include قَالُوا and يَقُولُ. We compared the 50 root totals in the table above, and the counts of all 372 words built on those roots, with the corpus's own dictionary pages at corpus.quran.com, and every one of them matches.

Two counts differ from our list of the most common Quran words, because the two pages count those words differently. That list gives يَوْم (yawm, day) 475, because it adds the 70 occurrences of يَوْمَئِذٍ (yawmaʾidhin, on that day), which the corpus files as a separate word with no root; the root y-w-m therefore has 405 here. The same list gives كَافِر (kāfir) 156 by counting it together with كَٰفِرُون (kāfirūn), which the corpus dictionary lists as a separate word, 27 and 129 times.

On the root pages, meanings in quotation marks are MASAQ word-by-word glosses and the others are the corpus dictionary's, and word types follow the dictionary's headings. The Arabic of each word follows the corpus, in the Quran's own spelling: كِتَٰب keeps the small dagger alif where modern print writes كِتَاب. A shadda the corpus puts on a word's first letter, which only shows that the word before it runs into it, is left out. Transliterations mark long vowels (ā ī ū) and the emphatic letters (ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ), write ʿ for ع and ʾ for a hamza, and end a word in -a where it is written with ة after a short a. Roots are written in plain letters, as on our other pages (r-h-m for ر ح م). In the web addresses of the root pages the emphatic and throat letters are doubled so that no two roots share an address: ر ح م is quran-root-rhhm, ع ل م is quran-root-elm, with e for ʿayn and a for hamza.

Our guide to learning to read the Quran in Arabic compares the courses and apps worth your time, and if you want the Arabic text beside an English translation while you work, our comparison of Quran editions with English translation covers the printed and online options.

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