Root · 191 in the Quran · 17 in 10 texts of the library
ضللPer Ibn Fāris, the root has one meaning: a thing's being lost and going off where it does … (root dll)
الضاد واللام أصل صحيح يدل على معنى واحد وهو ضياع الشيء وذهابه في غير حقه
Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-lugha · English rendering AI
The family of the root
Patterns computed · our dataThe words of ض ل ل that our sources attest: the root's letters in green, the added letters in gold.
24 words6 verbs5 verbal nouns1 participle2 intensives and elatives10 other nouns
- أَضَلَّhe, or it, made him, or caused him, to err, stray, or go astray
- ضَلَّhe deviated from the right way or course
- ضَلَالerror
- ضَلَالَة—
- تَضْلِيل—
The whole family5 groups, by pattern; tap a pattern to see what it does
Verbs6ضَلَّ · أَضَلَّ · ضَلَّلَ
The root as an action: the bare Form I, and the Forms made by adding letters before, inside or after the root.grammar →
- ضَلَّhe deviated from the right way or courseLaneForm IQurʾān ×53LaneIbn Fāris
- أَضَلَّhe, or it, made him, or caused him, to err, stray, or go astrayLaneForm IVQurʾān ×64LaneIbn Fāris
- ضَلَّلَhe, or it, made, or caused, him to pursue a course that led to error, or …LaneForm IIlibrary ×1Lane
- تَضَلَّلَit went awayLaneForm VLaneIbn Fāris
Verbal nouns5ضَلَال · ضَلَالَة · تَضْلِيل
The action itself, named as a noun (maṣdar).grammar →
Participles1مُضَلَّل
The one who does it, and the one it is done to.grammar →
Intensives, qualities and the elative2ضِلِّيل · ضَلُول
The quality carried far, held as a trait, or compared.grammar →
Reference
Why this shape?What each of the 12 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
This root has a weak or doubled letter, so real words change shape (qāla → qāʾil, not qāwil); the machine pours the letters in as they are, and matches attested words by their regular pattern.
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 · 170Ḍalla yaḍillu (ضل يضل) means he was lost.
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 · 393Ḍalla al-shay' (ضل الشئ) yaḍillu ḍalālan (يضل ضلالا) means it was lost and perished.
al-Jawharī (d. c. 393/1003), al-Ṣiḥāḥ. Admits only usage he judged sound.
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowIbn Fāris · 395The ḍād and lām form a sound root indicating a single meaning: the loss of a thing and its going away improperly.
Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004), Maqāyīs al-Lugha. Seeks each root's original sense (aṣl).
AI AI translation of the Arabic belowal-Rāghib · 502...grief, and a punishment for their having led [others] astray, as He indicated by His saying: 'that they may bear their own burdens in full on the Day of Resurrection, and some of the burdens of those whom they lead as
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 · 711Al-ḍalāl and al-ḍalālah (الضلال والضلالة) are the opposite of guidance and right direction.
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 ↗
Technical definitions2 · Ibn ʿArabī’s Iṣṭilāḥ, al-Jurjānī’s Taʿrīfāt
الضال
المملوك الذي ضل الطريق إلى منزل مالكه من غير قصد.
الضلالة
هي فقدان ما يوصل إلى المطلوب، وقيل: هي سلوك لا يوصل إلى المطلوب.
The same letters, turned
The same three letters in all their orders. Choose one.
ض ل ل
الضاد واللام أصل صحيح يدل على معنى واحد وهو ضياع الشيء وذهابه في غير حقه
ḍ-l-l: a sound root indicating a single meaning, which is the loss of a thing and its going away not in its rightful direction. AI
Ibn Fāris ↗Lisān ↗Quran ×191
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
- ضḍādside of the tongue, by the molars · voiced, continuant, velarisedSīb. · I. Jinnī
- لlāmedge of the tongue · voiced, in betweenI. Jinnī
- لlāmedge of the tongue · voiced, in betweenI. Jinnī
How each letter is made, in brief, from Sībawayh's and Ibn Jinnī's own sentences (linked); their words are under Reference.
Reference
How it is madeSībawayh and Ibn Jinnī · phonetics
English throughout: AI translation of the Arabic AI
ض
ومن بين أول حافة اللسان وما يليها من الأضراس مخرج الضاد
From between the first part of the tongue's edge and the molars next to it is the place of the ḍād. Sībawayh, line 26554 ↗
ومن أول حافة اللسان وما يليها من الأضراس مخرج الضاد
From the first part of the tongue's edge and the molars next to it is the place of the ḍād. Ibn Jinnī, line 975 ↗
ل
ومن حافة اللسان من أدناها إلى منتهى طرف اللسان، من بينها وبين ما يليها من الحنك الأعلى، مما فويق الضاحك والناب والرباعية والثنية، مخرج اللام
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, just above the premolar, the canine, the lateral and the central incisor, is the place of the lām. Ibn Jinnī, lines 977–978 ↗
ل
ومن حافة اللسان من أدناها إلى منتهى طرف اللسان، من بينها وبين ما يليها من الحنك الأعلى، مما فويق الضاحك والناب والرباعية والثنية، مخرج اللام
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, just above the premolar, the canine, the lateral and the central incisor, is the place of the lām. Ibn Jinnī, lines 977–978 ↗
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
ض
Level of existence: السماء الثانية · the second heaven
Divine Name: العليم · the All-Knowing (al-ʿAlīm)
Lunar mansion: الصرفة · al-Ṣarfa
Futūḥāt ch. 198, line 64627Spheres 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 2580ل
Level of existence: السماء الثالثة · the third heaven
Divine Name: القاهر · the Subduer (al-Qāhir)
Lunar mansion: العوا · al-ʿAwwā
Futūḥāt ch. 198, line 64654Spheres of its simples (ch. 2): 7 line 2576 ↗
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 2577ل
Level of existence: السماء الثالثة · the third heaven
Divine Name: القاهر · the Subduer (al-Qāhir)
Lunar mansion: العوا · al-ʿAwwā
Futūḥāt ch. 198, line 64654Spheres of its simples (ch. 2): 7 line 2576 ↗
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 2577Meaning by vowelal-Dabbāgh · a visionary claim about a primordial “Syriac”, not historical Syriac
English throughout: AI translation of the Arabic AI
ض
With fatḥa ـَ
عبارة عن الصحة وعدم البلاء.
It expresses health and the absence of affliction.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي إشارة إلى الشيء الذي لا نور فيه أو لا ظلام فيه.
It is an indication of the thing in which there is no light, or no darkness.
With kasra ـِ
فهي عبارة عن الخضوع.
It expresses submissiveness/humility.
ل
With fatḥa ـَ
فهي حصول المتكلم على شيء عظيم، وتكون إشارة إلى شيء عظيم.
It is the speaker's attaining of something great, and it serves as an indication of something great.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي إشارة إلى الشيء الذي لا نهاية له.
It is an indication of the thing that has no end.
With kasra ـِ
فهي إشارة من المتكلم إلى وجود ذاته أو إلى ذاته.
It is an indication by the speaker of the existence of his self, or of his self.
ل
With fatḥa ـَ
فهي حصول المتكلم على شيء عظيم، وتكون إشارة إلى شيء عظيم.
It is the speaker's attaining of something great, and it serves as an indication of something great.
With ḍamma ـُ
فهي إشارة إلى الشيء الذي لا نهاية له.
It is an indication of the thing that has no end.
With kasra ـِ
فهي إشارة من المتكلم إلى وجود ذاته أو إلى ذاته.
It is an indication by the speaker of the existence of his self, or of his self.
Two-letter nucleus0 roots in Ibn Fāris’s chapterض ل
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 17456 ↗
In the sister scriptsHebrew צ ל לSyriac ܥ ܠ ܠ
| Arabic | ض ل ل |
| Hebrew | צ ל ל |
| Syriac | ܥ ܠ ܠ |
| Ancient South Arabian (musnad) | 𐩳 𐩡 𐩡 |
| Phoenician | 𐤑 𐤋 𐤋 |
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 glosses ḍalla as ḍāʿa, 'to be lost'.well attested
The lexicographers in chronological order, from al-Khalīl to Lane.
Al-Khalīl glosses ḍalla as ḍāʿa, 'to be lost'. From there he extends it to failing to find one's way to a place (ḍalaltu makānī), to swerving from the aim (jāra ʿan al-qaṣd), and to a camel breaking loose (aḍalla baʿīrahu). He also records muḍallal for a man 'not granted success', given to follies. Al-Jawharī adds 'lost and perished', the phrase ḍull ibn ḍull for a man of unknown lineage, the ḍālla or stray beast, land where the road is lost, and Imruʾ al-Qays's epithet al-malik al-ḍillīl. Ibn Fāris reduces all of this to one meaning, loss and going astray. His proofs are physical: aḍalla al-mayyit, 'he buried the dead', and ḍalla al-laban fī al-māʾ, 'the milk was lost in the water'. Ibn Manẓūr defines ḍalāl as the opposite of hudā and rashād and records the dialects: ḍalaltu is Najdī, and al-Jawharī calls it the most chaste, while ḍaliltu is Ḥijāzī and ʿĀliya. Lane gives 'erred, strayed, went astray'. Al-Rāghib's excerpt turns to moral consequence: misleaders carry both their own burdens and those of the people they mislead (Q 16:25).
Draws on: al-ʿAyn · Ṣiḥāḥ · Maqāyīs · Mufradāt · Lisān · Lane
- al-Khalīl, Kitāb al-ʿAyn, s.v. ḍ-l
- Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-lugha, s.v. ḍ-l
- Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. ḍalla
Letters & soundThe data gives no heaven assignment from Ibn ʿArabī for either ḍād or lām.speculative
What the theorists of sound symbolism would say of these letters. Speculative by nature.
The data gives no heaven assignment from Ibn ʿArabī for either ḍād or lām. Al-Dabbāgh reads ḍād as 'health and the absence of affliction' and lām as 'attaining something great'. Applied to a root of loss, these meanings sit in tension with it, and they are better noted than forced. The Arabic grammarians describe ḍād as a lateral emphatic peculiar to Arabic. A sound-symbolist might hear the drawn-out lateral, together with the doubled lām, as a sliding away, but that is an impression. Mainstream linguistics treats all such readings as suggestive at most.
Draws on: al-Dabbāgh · Sībawayh/Ibn Jinnī phonetics
- al-Dabbāgh, in Ibn al-Mubārak, al-Ibrīz
Root structureḌ-l-l is a doubled (muḍāʿaf) root.plausible
The two-letter nucleus (Ibn Fāris's own chapters) and the permutations of the letters (Ibn Jinnī).
Ḍ-l-l is a doubled (muḍāʿaf) root. Its nucleus is simply ḍ-l, and no sibling roots are supplied. The permutations l-ḍ-l and l-l-ḍ are unattested, so Ibn Jinnī's greater derivation has nothing to work with. The root's internal structure appears in Ibn Fāris's own evidence instead. The sense runs from the stray animal and the man who misses the road to the buried dead and milk dissolved in water, where the thing is not moving at all but has become untraceable. Ibn al-Sikkīt, cited by Ibn Fāris, makes the same point: one is said to 'lose' (ḍalla) a mosque or a house that stays in place but cannot be found.
Draws on: doubled root · permutations · Maqāyīs evidence
- Wiktionary: Arabic root ض ل ل (link not verified)
Semitic kin & loanwordsArabic ḍ continues Proto-Semitic *ṣ́, which appears as ṣ in Hebrew and as ʿ or q in Aramaic.plausible
Cognates in the sister languages, and whether the word was borrowed.
Arabic ḍ continues Proto-Semitic *ṣ́, which appears as ṣ in Hebrew and as ʿ or q in Aramaic. Any cognate would therefore look quite different on the surface. No confident cognate of ḍ-l-l in the sense 'to be lost, go astray' is offered here. The word is native Arabic, and there is no basis for treating it as a loanword.
Draws on: Proto-Semitic *ṣ́ · no secure cognate
Quranic exegesisAt Q 1:7, al-Ṭabarī relies on the ḥadīth of ʿAdī b.plausible
How the classical exegetes read the word in the Quran.
At Q 1:7, al-Ṭabarī relies on the ḥadīth of ʿAdī b. Ḥātim to identify al-ḍāllīn with the Christians and 'those with whom He is angry' with the Jews. On Q 2:26 ('He leads astray many by it'), al-Zamakhsharī, a Muʿtazilī, reads divine iḍlāl as God's leaving the wilful to themselves (khidhlān) and not as God creating their error. Al-Rāzī answers him at length from the Ashʿarī position. At Q 2:282, an taḍilla iḥdāhumā is generally glossed as a witness forgetting, which is close to the lexical sense of losing track. Q 32:10, 'when we are lost (ḍalalnā) in the earth', uses exactly Ibn Fāris's sense of the buried dead and the milk lost in water.
Philosophy & kalāmIn kalām, hidāya and iḍlāl are a standard pair within the debate over human acts and divine justice.plausible
The word as a technical term in falsafa and theology.
In kalām, hidāya and iḍlāl are a standard pair within the debate over human acts and divine justice. The Muʿtazila, for example ʿAbd al-Jabbār, deny that God creates misguidance in anyone. They read the Quranic iḍlāl as naming, judging, or abandoning (khidhlān) those who have already strayed. The Ashʿarīs, al-Rāzī among them, hold that God creates both guidance and error, and that the human being 'acquires' (kasb) them.
Draws on: kalām · hidāya/iḍlāl · khalq al-afʿāl
Akbarian readingThe root does not occur in Faṣṣ Ādam, and the Iṣṭilāḥ gives no definition of it.plausible
The word in Ibn ʿArabī's text and terminology.
The root does not occur in Faṣṣ Ādam, and the Iṣṭilāḥ gives no definition of it. In the Noah chapter of the Fuṣūṣ, Ibn ʿArabī takes Q 71:24 ('increase the wrongdoers only in ḍalāl') and reads ḍalāl as ḥayra, bewilderment. The bewildered one moves in a circle around the Pole and is never far from it. The one on a 'long road' moves in a line, with a beginning and an end and a distance to cross. The reading reverses the lexical sense, loss off one's proper course, into a mode of nearness, and should be held beside Ibn Fāris's plain definition.
Draws on: Fuṣūṣ, Faṣṣ Nūḥ · no Faṣṣ Ādam occurrence · no Iṣṭilāḥ entry
- Q 71:24 ↗
- Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Faṣṣ Nūḥī
Reference