عَلَىٰ
ʿalā: on, upon, against
The 9th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
عَلَىٰ (ʿalā) means "on, upon, against". It appears 1,445 times in the Quran, making it the 9th most common word: about 1.87% of all the words you read.
#9most common word
1,445times in the Quran
1.87%of all the words
1,177ayahs it appears in
Example from the Quran
وَإِنَّ عَلَيْكُمْ لَحَٰفِظِينَ
Al-Infitar 82:10 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Fatiha 1:7.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways عَلَىٰ is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- عَلَىٰ347×
- عَلَى242×
- عَلَيْهِ143×
- عَلَيْهِمْ141×
- عَلَيْكُمْ121×
Small words like this are among the most frequent in the Quran. The count includes every time it appears, including with "and" or "so" attached.
Learn ʿalā and the other common words
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Sources
- Counts calculated by Ayah Explorer from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (morphology v0.4), using the open quran-morphology dataset.