أَوْ
Aw: or
The 42nd most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
أَوْ (aw) means "or". It appears 280 times in the Quran, making it the 42nd most common word: about 0.36% of all the words you read.
#42most common word
280times in the Quran
0.36%of all the words
213ayahs it appears in
Example from the Quran
أَوْ أَمَرَ بِٱلتَّقْوَىٰٓ
Al-Alaq 96:12 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:19.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways أَوْ is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- أَوْ263×
- أَوِ16×
- أَو1×
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 aw and the other common words
Start learningAyah 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.