Mathani
The Quran, counted and lit.
Mathānī is the Quran's own word for the passages it repeats. This page counts the book as it stands and lights up what the counting shows. Every number is computed from the text itself; the method is at the end.
Each point of light in the spiral is one verse. Move across it to read the surah names.
One opening, 114 times
بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Four words, nineteen letters. It stands at the head of 113 surahs.
The one surah that opens without it, At-Tawba (9), is matched by An-Naml (27), where it appears a second time inside verse 30, in Solomon's letter to the Queen of Sheba. That brings the total to 114: one for each surah.
Every exact phrase, counted across the whole book
The last verse brings the scale back to level
Tap any coin to read the whole verse.
Every verse where the phrase Allāhu yuḥibbu or Allāhu lā yuḥibbu appears word for word.
Words that come in pairs
Some words appear exactly as often as their counterpart. On both sides the rule is the same: every grammatical form of the word, singular and plural, with or without an attached particle, counted across the whole text. The bars show where in the book each word falls, surah by surah.
إِنَّ مَثَلَ عِيسَىٰ عِندَ اللَّهِ كَمَثَلِ آدَمَ خَلَقَهُ مِن تُرَابٍ ثُمَّ قَالَ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ
The likeness of Jesus with Allah is as the likeness of Adam. He created him of dust, then He said unto him: Be! and he is. 3:59
The verse that pairs them is itself one of the 25 mentions of each.
The two are often set against each other inside a single verse, and across the whole book they balance to the last mention.
Shaytān 70 times and shayātīn 18: 88. Malak 15 times and malā'ika 73: 88.
One of those twelve is the verse that gives the count: the number of the months with Allah is twelve months 9:36.
The dual (two months) and the plural add nine more mentions; every form together comes to 21.
Who hath created seven heavens in harmony. Thou canst see no fault in the Beneficent One's creation; then look again: canst thou see any rifts? 67:3
2:29, 17:44, 23:86, 41:12, 65:12, 67:3 and 71:15.
Names, and how often they are spoken
Twenty-five prophets are called by name. Moses is named most, 136 times; Pharaoh, his adversary, 74. Each name below is counted in every form it takes in the text.
times the name Allah appears. Five further times the text calls out Allāhumma, O Allah.
times the Quran names itself.
times Mary is named. She is the only woman called by her own name in the whole text, and surah 19 is hers.
times Muhammad is named: 3:144, 33:40, 47:2 and 48:29. Once more he is called Ahmad, in 61:6.
Letters that spell no word
Twenty-nine surahs open with detached letters: الم, الر, طه, يس, حم, ص, ق, ن and others. Fourteen different letters are used across them: exactly half of the Arabic alphabet's twenty-eight.
Ḥā Mīm opens seven surahs in a row.
words in a single verse, 2:282, on writing down a debt and calling witnesses.
Dark green with foliage, said of two gardens. 55:64
فَبِأَيِّ آلَاءِ رَبِّكُمَا تُكَذِّبَانِ
Which is it, of the favours of your Lord, that ye deny? The surah has 78 verses; this line is 31 of them.
Al-Mursalat (77) keeps its own refrain, woe unto the repudiators on that day, ten times.
What the surahs are named for
A surah takes its name from a word or a scene inside it. Read together, the names make a small inventory of a world: animals, weather, hours of the day, metals, people.
The shape of the book
Al-Baqara (2) is the longest surah, 286 verses. Three surahs have three verses: Al-Asr (103), Al-Kawthar (108) and An-Nasr (110); Al-Kawthar, at ten words, is the shortest of all. The long Medinan surahs sit near the front, and the short Meccan ones gather at the end.
surahs revealed in Mecca, by the traditional classification.
surahs revealed in Medina.
How this was counted
Text. The Tanzil Quran Text (tanzil.net), Simple and Uthmani editions, with the Kufan verse numbering of 6,236 verses. Letters are counted in the Simple text, with the Basmala headings of surahs 2 to 114 counted separately rather than inside each surah.
Words. Word counts and the longest verse follow the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com), which segments the text word by word and assigns each word a dictionary form. A plain split on spaces gives 77,800, because it separates particles such as yā that the Corpus keeps attached.
Pairs and names. Each figure counts every grammatical form of the word with any attached particle, and the same rule applies to both members of a pair. Every count was made twice, once from surface forms in Tanzil and once from Corpus dictionary forms; both routes agree on every number shown.
Translation. Verses in English are from Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930).