Root · 13 in the Quran · 27 in 13 texts of the library
خزنa single root denoting the safekeeping or protection of a thing; he excludes khazina … (root khzn)
الخاء والزاء والنون أصل يدل على صيانة الشيء
Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-lugha · English rendering AI
The family of the root
Patterns computed · our dataThe words of خ ز ن that our sources attest: the root's letters in green, the added letters in gold.
21 words4 verbs3 verbal nouns2 participles1 place or instrument2 intensives and elatives5 other nouns4 plurals
- خَزَائِن—
- خِزَانَةsmall chamber within a large chamber
- خَزَنَت—
- خَازِنone who reposits, stows, lays up, keeps, preserves, or guards, property
- مَخْزُونdeposits; reserves
The whole family7 groups, by pattern; tap a pattern to see what it does
Verbs4خَزَنَ · اِخْتَزَنَ · أَخْزَنَ
The root as an action: the bare Form I, and the Forms made by adding letters before, inside or after the root.grammar →
Form I vowels: فَعَلَ يَفْعُلُ (a – u; the imperfect from Lane's “aor.”)
Verbal nouns3خَزَن · خَزْن · خُزُون
The action itself, named as a noun (maṣdar).grammar →
Participles2خَازِن · مَخْزُون
The one who does it, and the one it is done to.grammar →
- خَازِنone who reposits, stows, lays up, keeps, preserves, or guards, propertyLaneactive, Form Ilibrary ×5Lane
- مَخْزُونdeposits; reservesautopassive, Form Ilibrary ×3
Place, time and instrument1مَخْزَن
Where or when it happens, and what it is done with: the m- nouns.grammar →
- مَخْزَنstorehouses; depotsautonoun of place or timelibrary ×3Lane
Intensives, qualities and the elative2خَزَّان · خَزِين
The quality carried far, held as a trait, or compared.grammar →
Other nouns5خَزَائِن · خِزَانَة · خَزَنَت
Nouns on other patterns; their meaning is learned word by word.grammar →
Plurals4خَزَنَة · خَازِنِين · خُزّان
Broken plurals rebuild the word on a new pattern; sound plurals add an ending.grammar →
- خَزَنَةbroken plural of خَزَنَتQurʾān ×1Lane
- خَازِنِينsound plural of خَازِنQurʾān ×1
- خُزّانbroken plural of خازِنlibrary ×1Ibn Fāris
- مَخازِنbroken plural of مَخْزَنlibrary ×2
Reference
Why this shape?What each of the 13 patterns does
What each pattern does. The pattern gives a tendency, not a rule: many words have drifted into meanings of their own.
The pattern machinePour the root into a pattern; see whether the word exists
Choose a pattern; the root's letters pour into it. Then see whether the word exists in our sources. The machine makes shapes; only usage makes words.
Not in our sources. A possible shape, not a word we can show: the Quran, the library and Lane do not have it for this root.
Place noun with -a. The place noun with the feminine -a. Sometimes it is only a variant of mafʿal; often it names the place where a thing is found in abundance (maʾsada, 'a place full of lions'). So maktab is the place of writing, and maktaba, where writings are gathered: a library, a bookshop. Our summary AI
But: maktaba is not in our classical dictionaries for k-t-b: Lane and al-Jawharī give maktab ('a school'), none gives maktaba. Its sense of 'library, bookshop' fits the pattern of abundance, but that is our reading of the pattern, not a classical entry. Many mafʿala words are single items of usage (maqbara 'cemetery'), which the grammarians call heard, not formed by rule.
The grammarians on this pattern (4)
ما يكون مفعلة لازمة لها الهاء والفتحة … وذلك إذا أردت أن تكثر الشيء بالمكان، وذلك قولك: أرض مسبعة، ومأسدة
Chapter on what is mafʿala, with the -a and the a-vowel always: that is when you mean that a thing abounds in a place, as you say 'a land of many beasts of prey (masbaʿa), of many lions (maʾsada)' AI
Sībawayh (d. c. 180/796), al-Kitāb, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn, 3rd ed. (Cairo: al-Khānjī, 1988), 4:94 · OpenITI line 21027–21028 ↗ · on this site · OpenITI RELEASE v2025.1.9, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
و نحو المظنة و المقبرة فتحا و ضما ليس بقياس
and words like maẓinna and maqbara (with a or u) are not by rule AI
Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249), al-Shāfiya fī ʿilm al-taṣrīf, ed. Ḥasan Aḥmad al-ʿUthmān (Mecca: al-Maktaba al-Makkiyya, 1995), 1:30 · OpenITI line 223 ↗ · on this site · OpenITI RELEASE v2025.1.9, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- “designate the place where the object signified by the noun from which they are formed, is found in large numbers or quantities” Wright, Grammar I, §247, p. 148 ↗ · on nouns of abundance, maf'ala · 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 1896) · public domain
- “Nouns of time and place not unfrequently take the feminine form” Wright, Grammar I, §225, p. 128 ↗ · on maf'ala as a variant of maf'al · 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 1896) · public domain
About thisWhat “attested” means here; the sources
Attested means found in our data: the Quranic Arabic Corpus (lemmas, verb Forms, participles, verbal nouns, plurals), the library's words (automatic analysis), Lane's Lexicon (his headwords, the Forms he numbers, the verbal nouns and plurals he names) and Ibn Fāris's entry. Nothing is generated for this list. Meanings are Lane's first gloss in his entry, or else the analyser's gloss (“auto”). Vowelling follows the corpus, then Lane, then the analyser; verbs are given in the regular perfect. Lane's Lexicon thins out after qāf, and a few of his entries cover several roots at once: those roots show no Lane. The patterns, written with ف ع ل, are computed by us.
The dictionaries
English: AI translation AIal-Khalīl · 170Khazana (خزن) the thing - so-and-so khazanahu yakhzunuhu khazn(an) - when he secured it in a khizāna (خزانة) [storehouse];
al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad (d. c. 170/786), Kitāb al-ʿAyn. The first Arabic dictionary, arranged by permutations of the root letters.
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowal-Jawharī · 393Khazantu (خزنت) the wealth and ikhtazantuhu (اختزنته): I put it in the khizāna (storehouse).
al-Jawharī (d. c. 393/1003), al-Ṣiḥāḥ. Admits only usage he judged sound.
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowIbn Fāris · 395The letters khāʾ, zāy, nūn form a root indicating the safeguarding of a thing.
Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004), Maqāyīs al-Lugha. Seeks each root's original sense (aṣl).
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowal-Rāghib · 502Al-khazn (الخزن): the safeguarding of a thing in the khizāna (storehouse);
al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (d. c. 502/1108), al-Mufradāt. Quranic vocabulary, from core sense to Quranic usage.
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowLisān · 711Khazana (خزن) the thing, yakhzunuhu, khazn(an), and ikhtazanahu (اختزنه): he secured it and placed it in a khizāna (خزانة);
Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311), Lisān al-ʿArab. The great compendium of the earlier dictionaries (entry shortened).
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowLane · 1876English, synthesising the classical dictionaries.
E. W. Lane (d. 1876), An Arabic-English Lexicon. English, synthesising the classical dictionaries.
Lane, Arabic-English Lexiconread Lane's entry online ↗
The same letters, turned
The same three letters in all six orders. Choose one.
خ ز ن
الخاء والزاء والنون أصل يدل على صيانة الشيء
kh-z-n: a root indicating the safekeeping of a thing. AI
an entry in Ibn Fārislater sources onlyin none of them
Do these six share one core meaning?
Reference
About thisal-Khalīl, Ibn Jinnī, Ibn Fāris; the counts across the dictionary
al-Khalīl (d. c. 170/786), Kitāb al-ʿAyn, as transmitted by al-Layth: a two-letter word “turns in two ways”, a three-letter word “in six ways” (masdūsa), four letters in 24, five in 120; “its used forms are written down and its unused ones dropped” (line 975 ↗). The dictionary is built on this: each chapter takes a set of letters and names which orders are used (mustaʿmal) and which unused (muhmal). The ring shows that verdict, from the chapter heading as edited (documented in the text; how much of the book is al-Khalīl's own is disputed).
A reported total. al-Suyūṭī transmits, from Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, that al-Khalīl put the possible forms, used and unused, of two to five letters at 12,305,412 (al-Muzhir, line 1347 ↗). It is reported, not found in the ʿAyn. It equals exactly the arrangements of 2 to 5 different letters out of 28 (756 + 19,656 + 491,400 + 11,793,600); the breakdown printed beside it is corrupt, and al-Zubaydī's count, given next, differs (6,659,400).
Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), al-Khaṣāʾiṣ, names the greater derivation (al-ishtiqāq al-akbar): bind a three-letter root and its six orders to one meaning, and bring stray members back “by the subtlety of the craft and interpretation” (line 7536 ↗). He says himself that it does not hold for every root (line 167 ↗; line 7603 ↗).
Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004) gives each root its own aṣl and treats a rearranged word as maqlūb, “turned round”, and so not a root of its own: “j-b-dh is not a root, because it is a single word, turned round” (Maqāyīs, line 6147 ↗). The ring sets his aṣl for each order side by side; whether they meet is the question.
Neighbours on the ring differ by one swap of two letters.
The critique. A source quoted by al-Suyūṭī calls the greater derivation Ibn Jinnī's innovation, “not relied on in the language” (al-Muzhir, line 6159 ↗).
The other axis. The root's letters also go into patterns that keep their order and change the frame: the patterns (awzān) and the verb Forms I–X.
Across Ibn Fāris's dictionary. Of the 2,300 possible sets of three different sound letters (no hamza, w or y), 1,021 have at least one order as an entry. How many of their six orders are entries:
- 1 of 6319
- 2 of 6218
- 3 of 6164
- 4 of 6155
- 5 of 6107
- 6 of 658
- 1 of 6148
- 2 of 6108
- 3 of 6157
- 4 of 6179
- 5 of 6111
- 6 of 643
Of the orders al-Khalīl calls used, 2,097 are entries in Ibn Fāris and 267 are not; 17 that he calls unused are entries in Ibn Fāris.
Attested here means found in our digital texts (Ibn Fāris, Lisān al-ʿArab, Lane, the Quranic Arabic Corpus), with w and y kept apart and hamza spellings merged; it is our data, not a classical verdict. English beside the Arabic is AI translation. Sources and grades: docs/research/root-permutations.md.
Letters & sound
- خkhāʾtop of the throat · voiceless, continuantSīb. · I. Jinnī
- زzāytongue-tip, by the front teeth · voiced, continuantSīb. · I. Jinnī
- نnūntip of the tongue · voiced, in betweenSīb. · I. Jinnī
How each letter is made, in brief, from Sībawayh's and Ibn Jinnī's own sentences (linked); their words are under Reference.
Sharing two of its three letters (computed; kinship of form, not of meaning)
Reference
How it is madeSībawayh and Ibn Jinnī · phonetics
English throughout: AI translation of the Arabic AI
خ
وأدناها مخرجا من الفم: الغين والخاء
The nearest of them to the mouth in place: the ghayn and the khāʾ. Sībawayh, line 26549 ↗
ومما فوق ذلك مع أول الفم، مخرج الغين والخاء
From above that, at the start of the mouth, is the place of the ghayn and the khāʾ. Ibn Jinnī, line 971 ↗
ز
ومما بين طرف اللسان وفويق الثنايا مخرج الزاي، والسين، والصاد
From between the tip of the tongue and just above the front teeth is the place of the zāy, the sīn and the ṣād. Sībawayh, line 26560 ↗
ومما بين الثنايا وطرف اللسان، مخرج الصاد والزاي والسين
From between the front teeth and the tip of the tongue is the place of the ṣād, the zāy and the sīn. Ibn Jinnī, line 983 ↗
ن
ومن حافة اللسان من أدناها إلى منتهى طرف اللسان ما بينها وبين ما يليها من الحنك الأعلى وما فويق الثنايا مخرج النون
From the edge of the tongue, from its nearest part to the end of its tip, between it and the upper palate next to it and what is just above the front teeth, is the place of the nūn. Sībawayh, lines 26555–26556 ↗
ومن طرف اللسان بينه وبين ما فويق الثنايا، مخرج النون
From the tip of the tongue, between it and what is just above the front teeth, is the place of the nūn. Ibn Jinnī, line 979 ↗
Sībawayh, al-Kitāb (ed. Hārūn) and Ibn Jinnī, Sirr ṣināʿat al-iʿrāb; OpenITI digital texts (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Full credits on each letter's page.
In the Breath of the All-MercifulIbn ʿArabī · metaphysics
English throughout: AI translation of the Arabic AI
خ
Spheres of its simples (ch. 2): 10 line 2573 ↗
ز
Level of existence: ما يظهر في ركن الهواء · what appears in the pillar (element) of air
Divine Name: الحي · the Living (al-Ḥayy)
Lunar mansion: الشولة · al-Shawla
Futūḥāt ch. 198, line 64951Spheres of its simples (ch. 2): 7 line 2570 ↗
Nature (ch. 2)
منها دون الألف فطبعها الحرارة واليبوسة
[Zāy and lām] of it, excluding alif: their nature is heat and dryness.
Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, line 2577ن
Level of existence: السماء الرابعة · the fourth heaven
Divine Name: النور · the Light (al-Nūr)
Lunar mansion: السماك · al-Simāk
Futūḥāt ch. 198, line 64663Spheres of its simples (ch. 2): 8 line 2571 ↗
Nature (ch. 2)
الثمانية فحروفها حارة يابسة
The eightfold [rank]: its letters are hot and dry.
Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, line 2580Meaning by vowelal-Dabbāgh · a visionary claim about a primordial “Syriac”, not historical Syriac
English throughout: AI translation of the Arabic AI
خ
With fatḥa ـَ
فهي طول إلى النهاية مع رقة.
It is length to the utmost, together with fineness/thinness.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي اسم لكمال في الحيوانات.
It is a name for a perfection in animals.
With kasra ـِ
فهي اسم لكمال في الجمادات.
It is a name for a perfection in inanimate things.
ز
With fatḥa ـَ
فهي اسم للشيء الذي إذا دخل على الشيء ضره، وقال مرة: اسم للشيء وما يتحرز منه.
It is a name for the thing that harms another thing when it enters upon it. On one occasion he said: a name for the thing and what one guards against.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي إشارة إلى القبيح الذي فيه ضرر كالكبائر.
It is an indication of the ugly thing that contains harm, such as the major sins.
With kasra ـِ
فهي إشارة إلى القبيح الذي لا ضرر فيه كالصغائر والشبهات والنجاسة.
It is an indication of the ugly thing that contains no harm, such as minor sins, doubtful matters and ritual impurity.
ن
With fatḥa ـَ
فهي الخير الساكن في الذات الشاعل فيها.
It is the good that dwells in the self, kindling [al-shāʿil, as written] within it.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي إشارة إلى الخير الكامل أو النور الساطع.
It is an indication of perfect good or radiant light.
With kasra ـِ
فهي إشارة إلى شيء يدركه المتكلم أو هو له.
It is an indication of something that the speaker perceives or that belongs to him.
Two-letter nucleus6 roots in Ibn Fāris’s chapterخ ز
Ibn Fāris groups his roots under two-letter chapters (“the X and the Y and what makes them three”). These are the roots of this root's chapter with the core sense he gives each. Setting them side by side is our juxtaposition; he does not himself draw a shared meaning. His chapter heading, line 8584 ↗
- خزعالخا والزا والعين أصل واحد يدل على القطع والانقطاعL8585
- خزفالخاء والزاء والفاء ليس بشيء فالخزف هذا المعروف ولسنا ندري أعربي هو أم لاL8590
- خزلالخاء والزاء واللام أصل واحد يدل على الانقطاع والضعفL8594
- خزمالخاء والزاء والميم أصل يدل على انثقاب الشيء فكل مثقوب مخزوم والطير كلها مخزومة لأن وترات أنفها مخزومة ولذلكL8596
- خزنالخاء والزاء والنون أصل يدل على صيانة الشيءQ 13 · L8604
- خزرالخاء والزاء والراء أصلان أحدهما جنس من الطبيخ والآخر ضيق في الشيءL8620
In the sister scriptsHebrew ח ז נSyriac ܚ ܙ ܢ
| Arabic | خ ز ن |
| Hebrew | ח ז נ |
| Syriac | ܚ ܙ ܢ |
| Ancient South Arabian (musnad) | 𐩭 𐩸 𐩬 |
| Phoenician | 𐤇 𐤆 𐤍 |
Letter for letter, by the regular sound correspondences of the Semitic languages (Arabic keeps several sounds the others merged). This shows how the root would be spelled; whether a related word exists is a separate question, answered in the Semitic lens. Where an Arabic sibilant (s, sh) continues two older sounds, both spellings are shown.
Lenses
AIClassical lexiconAl-Khalīl defines khazana as securing a thing (aḥrazahu) in a khizāna.well attested
The lexicographers in chronological order, from al-Khalīl to Lane.
Al-Khalīl defines khazana as securing a thing (aḥrazahu) in a khizāna. He then extends the idea to the person, citing Luqmān's saying that one's treasury is the heart and one's keeper the tongue, and to learning, as in 'the accusative is the treasury of grammar, Basra the treasury of the Arabs'. He also records khazina al-laḥm, 'the meat changed', with Ṭarafa's verse. Al-Jawharī adds khazana al-sirr, 'he concealed the secret', and the place-noun makhzan, and he treats the rancid-meat sense as an inversion of khanaza. Ibn Fāris reduces the root to ṣiyāna and expressly sets the meat sense aside as maqlūb. Al-Rāghib moves from storing in a treasury to any kind of keeping, secrets included, and reads the divine khazāʾin as God's power over what He wills to bring into being, or as the already-decreed allotments of creation, provision and term. Ibn Manẓūr reports Ibn al-Anbārī's gloss of 'the treasuries of God' as the hidden matters (ghuyūb) of His knowledge, so called because they are concealed from people, and Sufyān b. ʿUyayna's saying that Quranic verses are treasuries. Lane gives 'reposited, stowed, laid up, preserved' and marks 'concealed [a secret]' as tropical.
Draws on: al-ʿAyn · al-Ṣiḥāḥ · Maqāyīs · Mufradāt · Lisān · Lane
- Wiktionary, Appendix: Arabic roots خ ز ن ↗
- Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. خزن
Letters & soundThe Ibn ʿArabī letter data supplied lists no cosmological correspondence for khāʾ, zāy or nūn.speculative
What the theorists of sound symbolism would say of these letters. Speculative by nature.
The Ibn ʿArabī letter data supplied lists no cosmological correspondence for khāʾ, zāy or nūn. In al-Dabbāgh's letter-meanings, khāʾ is 'utmost length with fineness', and zāy is 'what harms a thing on entering it' or 'a thing and what one guards against it'. Nūn is 'the good that dwells within the self'. A symbolist reading could set 'what one guards against' (zāy) beside 'good held within' (nūn) and so arrive at guarding a stored good. That reading is constructed after the fact. Mainstream linguistics treats such sound-meaning correspondences as suggestive at most.
Draws on: al-Dabbāgh, al-Ibrīz · imsās
- Aḥmad b. al-Mubārak al-Lamaṭī, al-Ibrīz min kalām ... ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh
Root structureIbn Fāris's other khāʾ–zāy roots include khazaʿa (cutting off), khazala (being cut off, weakness), khazama (piercing), khazara (a kind of dish, and narrowness), and khazaf (pottery), which he suspects is not Arabic.plausible
The two-letter nucleus (Ibn Fāris's own chapters) and the permutations of the letters (Ibn Jinnī).
Ibn Fāris's other khāʾ–zāy roots include khazaʿa (cutting off), khazala (being cut off, weakness), khazama (piercing), khazara (a kind of dish, and narrowness), and khazaf (pottery), which he suspects is not Arabic. Among these, only khazana 'keeping safe' stands apart from the recurring ideas of cutting and narrowing. Among the permutations, khanaza (to go rancid) is treated by both al-Jawharī and Ibn Fāris as the source of which khazina is an inverted form. Zanikha, another attested permutation, is ordinarily glossed as rancidity of fat or oil, so three arrangements of these letters share the idea of stored food spoiling. That clustering is a juxtaposition consistent with Ibn Jinnī's 'greater derivation'; it is not a demonstrated derivation, and the 'safekeeping' sense does not take part in it.
Draws on: Maqāyīs nucleus خز · permutations · metathesis
- Ibn Jinnī, al-Khaṣāʾiṣ, bāb al-ishtiqāq al-akbar (link not verified)
- Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-lugha, s.vv. خزن, خنز
Semitic kin & loanwordsI know of no confident cognate of khzn in Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac, Akkadian, Geʿez or Epigraphic South Arabian.plausible
Cognates in the sister languages, and whether the word was borrowed.
I know of no confident cognate of khzn in Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac, Akkadian, Geʿez or Epigraphic South Arabian. Resemblances such as Hebrew ḥōsen 'wealth, store' do not show regular sound correspondences, and I do not propose them. Nothing suggests the Arabic word is a loan into Arabic. The borrowing runs the other way: makhzan passed into Italian magazzino and from there to French magasin and English 'magazine', and into Spanish, with the article, as almacén.
Draws on: no secure cognate · Arabic > Romance loan
Quranic exegesisFor Q 15:21, 'there is nothing but its treasuries are with Us', al-Ṭabarī's tradition links the treasuries chiefly to rain and the provision it brings.plausible
How the classical exegetes read the word in the Quran.
For Q 15:21, 'there is nothing but its treasuries are with Us', al-Ṭabarī's tradition links the treasuries chiefly to rain and the provision it brings. Al-Zamakhsharī and al-Rāzī treat the image as a figure for God's unlimited power to bring things into existence and to send them down in measured amounts, which is also al-Rāghib's first reading. In Q 15:22, 'you are not its keepers (bi-khāzinīn)', the sense is that people cannot store the rainwater themselves. Al-Rāghib also mentions a reading 'keeping it through gratitude'. In Q 6:50 and 11:31 the Prophet disclaims holding 'the treasuries of God', which Ibn al-Anbārī glosses as the unseen contents of divine knowledge. The khazana of Q 39:71 and 73 are the angelic keepers of Hell and of the Garden.
Akbarian readingIn Faṣṣ Ādam the root belongs to the image of the seal.well attested
The word in Ibn ʿArabī's text and terminology.
In Faṣṣ Ādam the root belongs to the image of the seal. The Perfect Human is compared to the bezel (faṣṣ) of the signet ring, which bears the engraving the king uses to seal his treasury (khizāna). He is called khalīfa because God preserves His creation through him, as a seal preserves treasuries (khazāʾin): no one dares open them without the king's permission. The world is thus 'the treasury of this lower world' (khizānat al-dunyā). When the Perfect Human departs from it, what the Real had stored there (ikhtazanahu) does not remain, and the world's contents are transferred to the next abode. The supplied data give no definition of khazāʾin in Ibn ʿArabī's Iṣṭilāḥ.
Draws on: Fuṣūṣ, Faṣṣ Ādam
- Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Faṣṣ Ādam
Reference