كَفَرَ
Kafara: to disbelieve, to deny
The 40th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
كَفَرَ (kafara) means "to disbelieve, to deny". It appears 289 times in the Quran, making it the 40th most common word: about 0.37% of all the words you read.
Example from the Quran
بَلِ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُكَذِّبُونَ
Al-Inshiqaq 84:22 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:6.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways كَفَرَ is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- كَفَرُوا۟166×
- كَفَرُوٓا۟23×
- كَفَرَ18×
- يَكْفُرُونَ12×
- تَكْفُرُونَ11×
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
كَفَرَ comes from the root ك ف ر. Other common words from this root: كَافِر (disbeliever).
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.