ظ ل م (z-l-m): Every Word From This Root in the Quran

Quran Root Words > Root z-l-m

The Arabic root ظ ل م (z-l-m) occurs 315 times in the Quran, in 12 different words, and is number 25 of the Quran's 1,642 roots by frequency. The most frequent word is ظَالِم (ẓālim), 129 times, followed by ظَلَمَ (ẓalama), 110 times.

What the root z-l-m means

The Quranic Arabic Corpus glosses the root's form I verb ظَلَمَ (ẓalama) as "to oppress, to wrong". Its other verbs are glossed there as follows: أَظْلَمَ (aẓlama), form IV, "to darken". In the MASAQ word-by-word glosses, ظَالِم (ẓālim) is most often rendered "wrongdoers".

All three letters of z-l-m, ظ ل 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 ظَالِم (ẓālim) and ظَلَمَ (ẓalama) only the vowels and the added letters differ.

Every word from the root z-l-m in the Quran

The Quran builds 12 different words on z-l-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. Verbs account for 111 of the 315 occurrences, in forms I and IV; 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 ظُلُمَٰت (ẓulumāt) 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 315, with the corpus's own dictionary entry for z-l-m, and all of them match.

The root z-l-m in the verses of the Quran

Words from z-l-m appear in 290 verses spread over 59 of the Quran's 114 suras. Sura 2 has the most of them, 27 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.

ظَالِم (ẓālim), 129 times

ذِكْرَىٰ وَمَا كُنَّا ظَٰلِمِينَ
Quran 26:209; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "unjust"

إِنَّا جَعَلْنَٰهَا فِتْنَةً لِّلظَّٰلِمِينَ
Quran 37:63; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "for the wrongdoers"

وَإِن كَانَ أَصْحَٰبُ ٱلْأَيْكَةِ لَظَٰلِمِينَ
Quran 15:78; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "surely wrongdoers"

ظَلَمَ (ẓalama), 110 times

وَمَا ظَلَمْنَٰهُمْ وَلَٰكِن كَانُوا۟ هُمُ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
Quran 43:76; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "we wronged them"

وَوَقَعَ ٱلْقَوْلُ عَلَيْهِم بِمَا ظَلَمُوا۟ فَهُمْ لَا يَنطِقُونَ
Quran 27:85; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "they wronged"

ظُلُمَٰت (ẓulumāt), 23 times

وَلَا ٱلظُّلُمَٰتُ وَلَا ٱلنُّورُ
Quran 35:20; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the darkness[es]"

هُوَ ٱلَّذِى يُصَلِّى عَلَيْكُمْ وَمَلَٰٓئِكَتُهُۥ لِيُخْرِجَكُم مِّنَ ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ إِلَى ٱلنُّورِ ۚ وَكَانَ بِٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ رَحِيمًا
Quran 33:43; word-by-word gloss of the marked word: "the darkness[es]"

Learning the words of z-l-m

ظَالِم (ẓālim), no. 86 with 129 and ظَلَمَ (ẓalama), no. 97 with 110, are on our list of the 100 most common Quran words, which counts them the same way. Its verbs follow the patterns of the Arabic verb forms (forms I and IV), and our Arabic verb conjugator conjugates any root in any form, so you can see how ظَلَمَ changes for person and tense. The root z-l-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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