01
Hunt
You are shown a few related words: different shapes, related meanings. Three consonants run through all of them. Find what repeats.
A daily Arabic root جذر
A two-minute daily puzzle for Qur'an readers.
Most Arabic words are built on a root, usually three consonants. Find the root, watch its word family appear, then meet it in an āyah.
Play today's root free · no account · nothing to install
Or get the Friday Root by email:
One root a week, then a note when the app opens. Your address is kept by Kit, the service that sends the email, and used for nothing else. Privacy
Day one · find what repeats 3 attempts
Three consonants run through all three words, in order. Tap them out.
Letter pool
The root
ṣ–b–r
patience · endurance · steadfastness
The letters stayed. Everything else moved.
That was the first step of one root. There is a new one every day: play today's in the app, or get one by email on Fridays.
How it plays
No lives, no energy bar, no reason to come back twice. It ends where it should end.
01
You are shown a few related words: different shapes, related meanings. Three consonants run through all of them. Find what repeats.
02
The root you found lights up inside every word it made. Patience, the patient one, endurance, the command to endure — one skeleton, wearing different clothes.
03
Then you meet the root in an āyah where it appears, in Uthmani script, with Pickthall's translation. It is the reason Jadhr exists.
The root you just found, in an āyah where it appears
فَٱصْبِرْ صَبْرًا جَمِيلًا
“But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see.”
Sūrat al-Maʿārij 70:5 · Pickthall
04
Last, you find the three root letters yourself in one word from that āyah, written in simple spelling. Then you are done. On later days a short Echo comes first: a root you met before returns as one quick question, so it stays with you.
Why a root and not a word
English word games guess spellings. Arabic has something else underneath its vocabulary: a system of roots. Learn one root and you start recognising its relatives. It is a head start, not a shortcut.
The grid of tiles is the easy part. What makes Jadhr worth opening is the content underneath it: authored roots, real word families, and every āyah machine-checked word by word against the Tanzil text and the Quranic Arabic Corpus, and chosen against published criteria.
of the rooted word occurrences in the Qur'an come from the 230 roots in Jadhr so far (33,567 of 50,269). Seeing a root is not the same as understanding a verse, but it is a start you can count.
semantic fields, from Mercy and Light to Struggle and Dominion, so the roots you hold form a map rather than a list.
word forms, each mapped to the root letters inside it.
Thirty days
One shared root a day through the month, in this order, from the first day of fasting your community keeps.
Written down before launch, so it can be held against us
Every one of these is a normal, profitable thing that daily games do. They are ruled out in the product spec, not in a blog post, because a Qur'anic word should never be the thing standing between you and a payment screen.
If Jadhr ever earns, it earns from tools for teachers, classes and masājid — the people who want more than one root a day — while the daily puzzle stays whole and free for everyone else.
Where it honestly is
The app is real and runs end to end. Every āyah is machine-checked word by word against the Tanzil text and the Quranic Arabic Corpus, every cited word is confirmed to carry its root, transliteration is generated under one declared scheme rather than typed by hand, and each āyah is chosen against published criteria. No one has given it a scholarly review, and we do not claim one. If you see a mistake, tell us and we will fix it. Reverence over speed.
Qur'an text checked against the Tanzil Project (tanzil.net); roots and morphology from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com, GNU GPL). Translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, 1930, public domain. All credits.
By email, once a week
One root every Friday: the three letters, the family they build, and an āyah where they appear. Two minutes to read, on the day it arrives.
When the app opens properly, ahead of Ramadan, you get one more note with a link in it. No launch sequence, no countdown, and unsubscribing takes one click.
Your address is kept by Kit, the service that sends the email, and used for that and nothing else. Never sold, never rented, never handed to an advertiser. For readers 13 and over. How we handle it.