عَلِمَ
ʿalima: to know
The 28th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
عَلِمَ (ʿalima) means "to know". It appears 382 times in the Quran, making it the 28th most common word: about 0.49% of all the words you read.
Example from the Quran
كَلَّا سَيَعْلَمُونَ
An-Naba 78:4 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:13.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways عَلِمَ is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- يَعْلَمُونَ81×
- يَعْلَمُ62×
- تَعْلَمُونَ54×
- وَٱعْلَمُوٓا۟18×
- وَيَعْلَمُ10×
Verbs are listed by their past-tense "he" form, as in Arabic dictionaries. The count includes every form of the verb, such as "he says", "they said" and "say!".
Related words from the same root
عَلِمَ comes from the root ع ل م. Other common words from this root: عَلِيم (all-knowing).
Ayah Explorer teaches the most common Quran words a few at a time, in short sessions.
Sources
- Counts calculated by Ayah Explorer from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (morphology v0.4), using the open quran-morphology dataset.