Qur'an Core Vocabulary — a free, non-profit tool for learning the language of the Qur'an.
بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
In the name of Allah, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful
Most of us meet the Qur'an through a translation. A translation is a great mercy — but it is one person's rendering of words that carry far more than any single English phrase can hold. The distance between "and We send down of the Qur'an that which is healing" and وَنُنَزِّلُ مِنَ ٱلْقُرْءَانِ مَا هُوَ شِفَآءٌ is not a small one.
The aim of this site is to close a little of that distance: to teach enough of the Qur'an's own language that when you read it, or stand in prayer, or listen to it recited, you are meeting Allah's words themselves — as close to their real meaning as a learner can come — rather than only ever meeting them second-hand.
Allah describes His Book as a healing and a mercy for those who believe:
وَنُنَزِّلُ مِنَ ٱلْقُرْءَانِ مَا هُوَ شِفَآءٌ وَرَحْمَةٌ لِّلْمُؤْمِنِينَ And We send down of the Qur'an that which is healing and mercy for the believers… Al-Isrāʾ 17:82
And He tells us plainly that the Book was made approachable:
وَلَقَدْ يَسَّرْنَا ٱلْقُرْءَانَ لِلذِّكْرِ فَهَلْ مِن مُّدَّكِرٍ And We have certainly made the Qur'an easy for remembrance, so is there any who will remember? Al-Qamar 54:17
The more of its language you understand, the more of that healing and mercy reaches you — and the more the recitation you already love begins to mean something as you hear it. What you learn, you can pass on to someone else. That is the whole intention.
A free flashcard course, a word-by-word reader for the entire Qur'an, grammar guides, and a library of every Qur'anic root — all in one place, all working offline once loaded, with nothing to install and no account required.
The course is built on a frequency analysis of the Qur'anic text. A small set of words does most of the work: the course's core list accounts for roughly 80% of every word in the Qur'an. Learning those first, in the order they actually occur, opens the text up far faster than the effort would suggest. The home page shows exactly what each stage of the course is worth.
Every word is taught with real verses — never an isolated word list. Each card shows up to three ayat drawn from the Qur'an, laid out word by word with the target word highlighted, alongside the Saheeh International translation, so a meaning is always grounded in actual usage.
Follow Learning Path is the fastest route. It takes the words in frequency order — pronouns, then prepositions, particles, nouns, verbs, adjectives and names — so each chapter you finish is the largest possible jump in what you can read next. A chapter is complete only when you have answered every word in it correctly, and finishing it unlocks the next.
If you already recite some surahs from memory, Surahs gives you one surah's vocabulary at a time, marking the words that carry most of it and the words found nowhere else in the Qur'an. Learning the words of something you already know by heart is the quickest way to feel the meaning arrive. Surahs are being added steadily — the whole of Juz 'Amma is covered, along with An-Najm and the surahs before Juz 'Amma — and the longer ones will follow.
Read is the whole Qur'an — all 114 surahs, 77,871 words — with every word's meaning underneath it, the root it is built on, and recitation you can play a word at a time. Tap any word for its meaning, its pronunciation and a link to its root family. Use it beside the course: learn a word, then go and meet it in place.
You never have to decide what to revise. Every answer you give — in a quiz, in Learn mode, in review — teaches the app what you actually know, and each word is scheduled to come back just before you would forget it. When something is due, Review shows a number. A word you get wrong returns quickly; one you know moves further out. The app also remembers which words you confuse with which, and puts them back in front of you together.
You do not need grammar to begin. But when a pattern keeps appearing, the Grammar guides explain it on a single page, and the Root Library shows how one three-letter root grows into a whole family of words — learn one root and you have a foothold in a dozen words.
This is a non-profit project. There is no advertising, nothing is sold, there are no subscriptions, and no money is taken or wanted — not now and not later. We are not seeking income, recognition, or any other benefit from it. It is built and maintained by a very small team, in our own time, and offered freely for the sake of Allah alone.
Because the team is small, we need your help to keep it accurate. If you find anything wrong — a meaning that is off, an example that does not fit its word, a translation that reads badly, a page that will not load — please take a screenshot and send it to info@learn-quranic-vocab.com. Suggestions are just as welcome. A correction from a reader is the most valuable thing this project can receive, and every one is acted on.
We ask Allah to forgive any mistake we have made in His Book or in explaining it. Our intention is only to make His words easier to understand for those who want to; whatever is right in it is from Allah, and whatever is wrong is from us, and we ask to be corrected.
This is a vocabulary and language-learning aid, not a work of Islamic scholarship, a certified translation, or a substitute for study with a qualified teacher. Word meanings are drawn from established Qur'anic word-by-word and morphological sources and checked for accuracy where possible, but Arabic words — especially in the Qur'an — often carry a depth and range of meaning that a short flashcard gloss cannot fully capture. For matters of interpretation, jurisprudence, or ruling, please consult a qualified scholar.
Word-by-word Arabic/English data is drawn from the word-by-word Qur'an dataset published by QuranExcel.com, which in turn draws its verse-level English translations from the Saheeh International translation (Umm Muhammad et al., Abul-Qasim Publishing House) as published on Quran.com. Word frequency data is derived from a statistical analysis of the Qur'anic text.
Grammatical annotation — the root, dictionary form (lemma), part of speech and grammatical details behind every word, and the whole Root Library — comes from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (morphology v0.4, © Kais Dukes, GNU General Public License). It is used here unmodified; visit corpus.quran.com for the original annotation and any later corrections.
The core meaning given for each root in the Root Library is written by us, grounded in each root's actual word family — the corpus records which root a word belongs to but does not gloss the roots themselves. Roots we are not confident about carry no meaning rather than a guess.
The Arabic text of the Qur'an is verified against the Tanzil Uthmani text (© Tanzil Project, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0). Recitation is streamed from EveryAyah and the Quran.com audio CDN; it is the one part of this site that needs a connection.
See the Terms of Use for more on how this content may be used, and please let us know if we've mischaracterized a source anywhere here.
Found an error, have a suggestion, or just want to say hello? Contact: info@learn-quranic-vocab.com.
