Quran One Time Roots

Some individuals make the claim that one can fully understand the Quran just by seeing how the word is used throughout the Quran and within its given context, making the language of the Quran self-explanatory without the need for lexicons or dictionaries. This approach, while feasible for much of the Quran, has a couple major drawbacks.

Firstly, many words and roots used in the Quran are multi-meaning. It is not uncommon for roots that are used frequently in the Quran to have very different meanings. For example, the first word in the Quran is بِسْمِ bismi. The root for this word is س م و and occurs 493 times in the Quran, yet the meaning for this root can be sky, heaven, name, attribute, fixed, specified, or predetermined.

Or take the example of the root for the word Islam which comes from the root س ل م. This root occurs 157 times in the Quran, yet has a multitude of meanings in the Quran: Submission, peace, sound (whole and able without blemish), wholly, solely, exclusively, greeting, payment, stairway, ladder. These examples show that while a single word root might occur many times in the Quran the range of meanings derived from that root can be many.

The second issue is if the expectation is that with enough use cases in the Quran one can attempt to derive a meaning for the words using the Quran alone, this becomes very difficult if not impossible for the roots that only occur a few times throughout the entire Quran. The Quran contains ~1790 different roots, of which 415 roots only occur a single time in the entire Quran impacting 315 verses. If we include words that have a root that occurs twice as well then that number increases to 845 words that impact 619 verses. If we included any word that has a root that occurs five or fewer times in the entire Quran then that impacts 2065 words impacting 1505 verses. This is additionally compounded when the few occurrences are also multi-meaning.