نَفْس
Nafs: soul, self
The 39th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026
Short answer
نَفْس (nafs) means "soul, self". It appears 295 times in the Quran, making it the 39th most common word: about 0.38% of all the words you read.
#39most common word
295times in the Quran
0.38%of all the words
268ayahs it appears in
Example from the Quran
وَإِذَا ٱلنُّفُوسُ زُوِّجَتْ
At-Takwir 81:7 · Read the translation on Quran.com
It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:9.
How it appears in the Quran
The most common ways نَفْس is written, with small words like "and" or endings like "his" attached:
- أَنفُسَهُمْ34×
- أَنفُسِهِمْ23×
- نَفْسٍ20×
- أَنفُسَكُمْ14×
- أَنفُسِكُمْ14×
The count includes every form of the word: singular and plural, and with endings like "the", "and" or "his" attached.
Learn nafs 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.