Word-count miracles

Some of the most widely shared facts about the Quran are counts. The word "day" appears 365 times, and "month" twelve. "This world" and "the Hereafter" appear equally often, and so do "angels" and "devils". Much of this list goes back to the Egyptian writer Abd al-Razzaq Nawfal and his book al-I'jaz al-'Adadi li-l-Qur'an al-Karim (The Numerical Miracle of the Noble Quran). Today it circulates in posts and videos that give the numbers but rarely say how they were counted.

That matters, because a count depends on its method. Count every form of "day" and you get 475. Count it one particular way and you get 365. This page counts each claim from a full grammatical analysis of the Quran's text and states the rule each count uses. The counter at the bottom of the page lets you recount any of them yourself, and count any other word in the Quran.

How the words were counted

The counts come from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, a word-by-word grammatical analysis of all 77,429 words of the Quran in the Uthmani script, built at the University of Leeds and since corrected by other researchers. For every word it records the dictionary form (the lemma), the three-letter root, and the grammar: singular, dual or plural, any pronoun attached to it, and any particle joined to its front.

Four decisions change a count:

• Which forms of the word. One lemma covers yawm (a day), yawmayn (two days) and ayyam (days). A claim may count one of these or all of them.
• Attached pronouns. Arabic joins possessives to the noun: yawmuhum, "their day". Some counts leave these out.
• Prefixes. The article al- and the particles for "and", "with" and "for" are written joined to the word. They are normally counted, since they do not change the word itself.
• Word or root. The root n-f-' (benefit) gives a noun, a plural and a verb. Some claims count one word, others every word from the root.

None of these choices is wrong. The questions to ask of any claim are whether it states its rule, and whether both sides of a pair are counted by the same rule.

The claims, counted

Each count below was made from the corpus data. "Check" opens the counter with that exact rule set, so you can see every verse it includes.

Every one of these counts reproduces exactly under its stated rule. None of the numbers is invented.

Where a number meets the text

The strongest cases are those where the number matches something the verse itself says. "Month" in the singular appears twelve times, and the Quran states the number of months directly:

"Indeed, the number of months ordained by Allah is twelve—in Allah's Record since the day He created the heavens and the earth—of which four are sacred." (Quran 9:36)

"Seven heavens" occurs seven times:

• 2:29: "Then He turned towards the heaven, forming it into seven heavens."
• 17:44: "The seven heavens, the earth, and all those in them glorify Him."
• 23:86: "Who is the Lord of the seven heavens and the Lord of the Mighty Throne?"
• 41:12: "So He formed the heaven into seven heavens in two Days."
• 65:12: "Allah is the One Who created seven heavens [in layers], and likewise for the earth."
• 67:3: "[He is the One] Who created seven heavens, one above the other."
• 71:15: "Do you not see how Allah created seven heavens, one above the other."

"Day" at 365 matches the days of a solar year. The calendar the Quran sets for worship, though, is lunar, about 354 days: "They ask you [O Prophet] about the phases of the moon. Say, 'They are a means for people to determine time and pilgrimage'" (Quran 2:189). The match is with the sun's year, not the year Muslims count by.

Weighing the claims

In their favour, every count holds. They were made from a dataset built for grammatical research, by people with no stake in any numerical claim. Anyone can check them verse by verse.

A careful reader should also weigh three things.

The rule changes from claim to claim. "Day" is counted in the singular without pronouns; "angels" in every form; "benefit" as a whole root; "the Hereafter" in the feminine only. Each rule is reasonable alone. But when the rule is chosen after the counting, a balance is easier to find, and a sceptic will say so.

Equal counts are common. Among the 591 nouns the Quran uses eight times or more, 5,147 pairs share exactly the same count. Counting whole roots gives another 3,914 equal pairs. A long text produces many matching numbers, so a balanced pair is worth noting mainly when its two words belong together and are counted by the same rule.

The Quran's challenge is not about numbers. It asks its doubters to "produce a surah like it" (Quran 2:23; Quran 10:38). That challenge concerns its language, meaning and guidance, which its first hearers, masters of Arabic, could judge for themselves. They had no way to count words across the whole text, and the Quran never points to such counts.

The fairest reading treats these patterns as subtle correspondences that many readers find moving, not as the ground the case for the Quran stands on. A count tied to the meaning of its verse, like twelve months in the verse that says the months are twelve, deserves attention. A pair that balances only under a rule chosen for it adds little.

The objection is taken up in full, with the Code 19 theory and ring composition, in Do numerical and ring-composition miracles prove the Quran divine?

More pairs the counter found

We ran every noun and every root in the Quran through the counter, kept the pairs with equal counts, and ranked them by how closely their meanings relate. The pairs below came out at the top. Because they were found by searching thousands of equal pairs, they are weaker evidence than a pair named before counting. They are offered for interest, and they show how readily such pairs appear.

Sources

• Quranic Arabic Corpus, morphology version 0.4, Kais Dukes, University of Leeds: corpus.quran.com
• Corrections to the corpus morphology (roots, lemmas and the split of yawma'idhin): github.com/mustafa0x/quran-morphology
• Abd al-Razzaq Nawfal, al-I'jaz al-'Adadi li-l-Qur'an al-Karim, the source of many of the balanced pairs above
• Quran translations: The Clear Quran, Dr. Mustafa Khattab