Quran word by word
Reading the Quran word by word means two different things, and most apps offer one of them. One is a gloss under every Arabic word, so you can see what that word means. The other is a highlight that moves word by word as a reciter reads, so you can hear which word you are looking at. Quran Habit does both, and this page is honest about where each one works.
A meaning under every word, in 14 languages
Word by word is one of the app's 4 scripts, beside Uthmani, IndoPak and tajweed. Turn it on and each Arabic word carries its own meaning underneath, rather than a whole verse translated as one block. It works in 14 languages, so the gloss is in the language you already read.
This is the layer that turns reading into study. A verse translation tells you what the verse says. A word gloss tells you which Arabic word carried which part of it, and after a few weeks you start recognising words before you read the gloss.
A highlight that follows the reciter
The second half is audio. As the reciter reads, the word being recited lights up. In the app that runs for 11 of the 40 reciters. On this website it runs for one, Mishary Alafasy, and you can try it right now without installing anything:
- Al-Mulk recited by Alafasy, with the word highlight
- Al-Fatihah 1:1, a single ayah with the same player
Only one reciter on the website, and that is a correctness limit rather than a shortage of recordings. The word timings were generated against one specific set of recordings, and playing them against a different recording of the same reciter drifts the highlight onto the wrong word. We would rather run it for one reciter correctly than for forty approximately.
Where to start
- Start with a short surah. Al-Fatihah is seven ayat and you already know most of it by ear, which makes the gloss easy to check against what you expect.
- Read the same passage twice. Once with the translation for the sense, once word by word for the words.
- Listen while you read. The highlight teaches you where a word ends, which is the part transliteration never manages to convey.
Where another app is better at this
If word-level study is your only reason for installing anything, install Al Quran (Tafsir & by Word) from the Greentech Apps Foundation instead. Their own materials claim word-by-word translation in 15 or more languages against our 14, plus root, lemma, grammar, morphology, occurrences and verb forms for each word, none of which Quran Habit has. They are free and work offline. Read the full comparison, including where we win.
If you are still choosing, the five checks for a word by word Quran app run the same question across every app whose materials we have read, with what each one claims in its own words.
How much to read, and how often
Word by word is slow, which is the point, and it makes a plan more useful rather than less: a page a day read closely beats twenty pages skimmed. The Quran reading plan is the same 604 pages divided over the days you have, and the khatm calculator on this site does the arithmetic without an account.
Get it
Quran Habit is on Google Play and the App Store.
Common questions
Is word by word available on this website?
The word-level highlight is, on the listen player and on single ayah pages. The word meanings are an app feature: some of the data behind them comes from a source we have not cleared for a public website, and the rest is not built into these pages yet, so we do not put them here.
Which languages have word-by-word meanings?
14 of them, checked against the data the app downloads rather than a list in a document: English, Indonesian, Urdu, Bengali, Turkish, Russian, French, German, Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Persian, Chinese and Albanian.
Does it cost anything?
Reading the Quran on this website is free with no account. Nothing is sold on this website. Anything paid inside the app is shown on its Google Play listing.
The Quran, word by word, and a daily reading habit in one free app.