إِلَّا
Illā: except, but
The 18th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
إِلَّا (illā) means "except, but". It appears 659 times in the Quran, making it the 18th most common word: about 0.85% of all the words you read.
#18most common word
659times in the Quran
0.85%of all the words
601ayahs it appears in
Example from the Quran
إِلَّا حَمِيمًا وَغَسَّاقًا
An-Naba 78:25 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:9.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways إِلَّا is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- إِلَّا559×
- إِلَّآ100×
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 illā 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.