مَا

Mā: what; not; that which

The 3rd most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026

Short answer

مَا (mā) means "what; not; that which". It appears 2,565 times in the Quran, making it the 3rd most common word: about 3.31% of all the words you read.

#3most common word
2,565times in the Quran
3.31%of all the words
1,841ayahs it appears in

Example from the Quran

عَمَّ يَتَسَآءَلُونَ

An-Naba 78:1 · Read the translation on Quran.com

It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:3.

How it appears in the Quran

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

  • مَا711×
  • وَمَا512×
  • بِمَا253×
  • مَّا162×
  • وَمَآ134×

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.