قَالَ

Qāla: to say (he said)

The 7th most common word in the Quran · Updated 18 October 2026

Short answer

قَالَ (qāla) means "to say (he said)". It appears 1,618 times in the Quran, making it the 7th most common word: about 2.09% of all the words you read.

#7most common word
1,618times in the Quran
2.09%of all the words
1,321ayahs it appears in

Example from the Quran

قُلْ يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلْكَٰفِرُونَ

Al-Kafirun 109:1 · Read the translation on Quran.com

It first appears in Al-Baqarah 2:8.

How it appears in the Quran

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

  • قَالَ412×
  • قُلْ218×
  • قَالُوا۟173×
  • وَقَالَ85×
  • قَالُوٓا۟77×

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.