كَانَ

Kāna: to be (was)

The 10th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026

Short answer

كَانَ (kāna) means "to be (was)". It appears 1,358 times in the Quran, making it the 10th most common word: about 1.75% of all the words you read.

#10most common word
1,358times in the Quran
1.75%of all the words
1,149ayahs it appears in

Example from the Quran

وَفُتِحَتِ ٱلسَّمَآءُ فَكَانَتْ أَبْوَٰبًا

An-Naba 78:19 · Read the translation on Quran.com

It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:10.

How it appears in the Quran

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

  • كَانَ323×
  • كَانُوا۟210×
  • كُنتُمْ152×
  • وَكَانَ84×
  • كُنَّا62×

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!".

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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.