أَنْ

An: to, that (before a verb)

The 19th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026

Short answer

أَنْ (an) means "to, that (before a verb)". It appears 616 times in the Quran, making it the 19th most common word: about 0.8% of all the words you read.

#19most common word
616times in the Quran
0.8%of all the words
532ayahs it appears in

Example from the Quran

أَن جَآءَهُ ٱلْأَعْمَىٰ

Abasa 80:2 · Read the translation on Quran.com

It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:26.

How it appears in the Quran

The most common ways أَنْ is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:

  • أَن461×
  • أَنْ57×
  • أَلَّا43×
  • أَنِ20×
  • وَأَن15×

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.

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Sources

  1. Counts calculated by Ayah Explorer from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (morphology v0.4), using the open quran-morphology dataset.