Marked words appear in this translation and in no other English translation of this verse. Common small words and older spellings are not marked. The marks show where the wording differs, not where the meaning does.
Talal Itani· published 2012
Say, "If the ocean were ink for the words of my Lord, the ocean would run out, before the words of my Lord run out," even if We were to bring the like of it in addition to it.
Translation Talal Itani, ClearQuran·Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1875–1936 · published 1930
Say: Though the sea became ink for the Words of my Lord, verily the sea would be used up before the words of my Lord were exhausted, even though We brought the like thereof to help
Sources
Translation Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran·Public domain — copyright term expired
Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran·1930 translation, digital edition of unverified printing·None — public domain work
·Public domain — copyright term expired·retrieved 24 Aug 2026
Edward Henry Palmer1840–1882 · published 1880
Say, 'Were the sea ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would surely fail before the words of my Lord fail; aye, though we brought as much ink again
Sources
Translation Edward Henry Palmer, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
SAY: Should the sea become ink, to write the words of my Lord, the sea would surely fail ere the words of my Lord would fail, though we brought its like in aid
Sources
Translation John Medows Rodwell, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
Say, if the sea were ink to write the words of my Lord, verily the sea would fail, before the words of my Lord would fail; although We added another sea like unto it as a farthersupply
Sources
Translation George Sale, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
George Sale, English translation of the Qur'an·1734 translation, digital edition of unverified printing·None — public domain work
·Public domain — copyright term expired·retrieved 24 Aug 2026
Other languages (18)Shqip · Albanian
Thuaj: "Sikur deti të ishte ngjyrë për (të shkruar) fjalët e Zotit tim, pa dyshim se deti do të shterohej para se të mbaronin fjalët e Zotit tim, edhe sikur të sillnim edhe dete të tjera si plotësim."
Translated by the team of Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
বাংলা · Bengali
(হে রাসূল!) তুমি বলো: ‘আমার রবের বাণী লেখার জন্য সমুদ্র যদি কালি হয়ে যায়, তবে আমার রবের বাণীগুলো শেষ হওয়ার আগেই সমুদ্রের পানি নিঃশেষ হয়ে যাবে; যদিও এর সাহায্যার্থে অনুরূপ আরো একটি সমুদ্রও নিয়ে আসি, তবে সেটাও (যথেষ্ট হবে না)।’
Translated by the team of Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Dawah Association in Rabwah, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.2
Bosanski · Bosnian
Reci: “Kada bi more bilo mastilo da se ispišu riječi Gospodara moga, more bi presahlo, ali ne i riječi Gospodara moga, pa i kad bismo ga proširili morem poput njega.”
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 2.0.4
Hrvatski · Croatian
Reci: “Kada bi more bilo mastilo da se ispišu riječi Gospodara moga, more bi presahlo, ali ne i riječi Gospodara moga, pa i kad bismo ga proširili morem poput njega.”
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.1
Fulfulde · Fulani
Maaku: "Sinno maayo ngo laatino ndaha fii Daaluyeeji Joomi am ɗi, maayo ngo re'ayno ko adii ndee re'ata Daaluyeeji Joomi am ɗin, sinno Min addii yeru maggo e ɓeydude".
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
ქართული · Georgian
თქვი (ო, მოციქულო): «თუ ზღვა ჩემი უფლის სიტყვების (დასაწერად) მელანი იქნებოდა, ზღვა (მელანი) აუცილებლად ამოიწურებოდა მანამდე, ვიდრე ჩემი უფლის სიტყვები ამოიწურებოდა, თუნდაც მას კიდევ ერთი ამდენივე [ზღვა] დაგვემატებინა დამხმარედ (პირველის გარდა)».
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.7
Deutsch · German
Sag: „Wenn das Meer Tinte für die Worte meines Herrn wäre, würde das Meer fürwahr zu Ende gehen, bevor die Worte meines Herrn zu Ende gingen, auch wenn Wir als Nachschub noch einmal seinesgleichen hinzubrächten.“
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.15
Ελληνικά · Greek
Πες (ω, Μωχάμμαντ): «Αν η θάλασσα ήταν μελάνι για (να γραφτούν) τα Λόγια του Κυρίου μου, σίγουρα, η θάλασσα θα εξαντλούταν πριν να τελειώσουν τα Λόγια του Κυρίου μου, ακόμη κι αν φέρναμε και άλλες (θάλασσες) σαν κι αυτή για να την εφοδιάσουν.»
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
हिन्दी · Hindi
(ऐ नबी!) आप कह दें : यदि सागर मेरे पालनहार की बातें लिखने के लिए स्याही बन जाए, तो निश्चय सागर समाप्त हो जाएगा इससे पहले कि मेरे पालनहार की बातें समाप्त हों, यद्यपि हम उसके बराबर और स्याही ले आएँ।
Translated by Azizul Haq Al-Omari
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.5
Italiano · Italian
Di’: «Se il mare fosse inchiostro per scrivere le Parole del mio Dio, il mare finirebbe prima che finiscano le Parole del mio Dio, anche se ne portassimo altrettanto!
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
Lietuvių · Lithuanian
109. Sakyk (Muchammedai ﷺ žmonijai): „Jei jūra būtų rašalas mano Viešpaties Žodžiams (užrašyti), iš tiesų, jūra išsektų prieš tai, kol mano Viešpaties Žodžiai pasibaigtų, net jei Mes atneštume (kitą jūrą) panašią į tai padėti.“
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.0
Русский · Russian
Скажи: «Если бы море было чернилами для слов моего Господа, то море иссякло бы прежде, чем иссякнут слова моего Господа, даже если бы Мы принесли в помощь столько же».
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.1
Српски · Serbian
Реци: „Када би море било мастило да се испишу речи мога Господара, море би пресушило, али не и речи мога Господара, па и кад бисмо га проширили морем попут њега.“
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.4
Kiswahili · Swahili
Sema: Lau kuwa bahari ingekuwa ndiyo wino kwa maneno ya Mola wangu Mlezi, basi bahari ingelimalizika kabla ya kumalizika maneno ya Mola wangu Mlezi, hata tungeliileta mfano wa hiyo kuongezea.
Issued by the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
Svenska · Swedish
Säg: ”Om havet vore bläck för min Herres ord, skulle det tömmas innan min Herres ord tar slut, även om vi skulle fylla det med ännu ett hav.”
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
Türkçe · Turkish
De ki: “Rabbimin sözleri için deniz(ler) mürekkep olsa, buna destek olarak bir o kadar daha katsak Rabbimin sözleri tükenmeden o deniz(ler) tükenir.”
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.4
اردو · Urdu
کہہ دیجئے کہ اگر میرے پروردگار کی باتوں کے[1] لکھنے کے لئے سمندر سیاہی بن جائے تو وه بھی میرے رب کی باتوں کے ختم ہونے سے پہلے ہی ختم ہو جائے گا، گو ہم اسی جیسا اور بھی اس کی مدد میں لے آئیں.
Translated by Muhammad Ibrahim Junagarhi, developed under the supervision of the Rowwad Translation Center. The original translation is available for the purpose of expressing opinion, evaluation, and continuous development.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.3
About these translations
5 cleared translations, newest first, by year of publication, so the modern English comes before the historical ones. That is an ordering by date, not a judgement. Each is shown complete — this platform never excerpts a translation — and each renders under its translator's name. No translation here is marked as the correct one.
Which translations appear here is set by copyright: they are the ones whose rights could be documented and cleared. The selection is not a judgement that these are the best.
About easy-read
Easy-read
Easy-read is a simplified pronunciation,
not authoritative — a rule-by-rule romanisation, not a reading.
Each verse ends in its pause form, as it is said when you stop there. Pauses inside a verse and other tajwid rules are not shown. It is derived from the Tanzil
Simple edition, while the Arabic above is the
Uthmani edition; both are cleared, but they are not the
same edition and their orthography differs.
Talal Itani2012 Say, "I am only a human being like you, being inspired that your god is One God. Whoever hopes to meet his Lord, let him work righteousness, and never associate anyone with the service of his Lord."
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 Say: I am only a mortal like you. My Lord inspireth in me that your Allah is only One Allah. And whoever hopeth for the meeting with his Lord, let him do righteous work, and make none sharer of the worship due unto his Lord
Edward Henry Palmer1880 Say, 'I am only a mortal like yourselves; I am inspired that your God is only one God. Then let him who hopes to meet his Lord act righteous acts, and join none in the service of his Lord
John Medows Rodwell1861 SAY: In sooth I am only a man like you. It hath been revealed to me that your God is one only God: let him then who hopeth to meet his Lord work a righteous work: nor let him give any other creature a share in the worship of his Lord
George Sale1734 Say, verily I am only a man as ye are. It is revealed unto me that your God is one only God: Let him therefore who hopeth to meet his Lord, work a righteous work; and let him not make any other to partake in the worship of his Lord
These figures count the words the translations share. They measure wording, not meaning, and they do not say which translation is right.
Derived measure: mean pairwise Jaccard distance over the
lowercased word sets of the 5 renderings above —
0.60 on a scale
where 0 means identical wording and 1 means no shared words. It is
computed, not judged.
The page says a verse is worded differently only above the cut below. The cut is a stated convention, not a property of the text, and it can be changed.
The cut
0.644
Share of measured verses above it
33%
Verses above it
2,079
Verses measured
6,236
Talal Itani · Edward Henry Palmer0.67
Talal Itani · John Medows Rodwell0.65
Edward Henry Palmer · George Sale0.63
John Medows Rodwell · George Sale0.61
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · George Sale0.61
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · John Medows Rodwell0.60
Edward Henry Palmer · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.58
Talal Itani · George Sale0.57
Talal Itani · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.56
Edward Henry Palmer · John Medows Rodwell0.53
One bar per pair of renderings, longest bar for the pair
sharing fewest words. Every pair is shown; none is singled out.
Method Wording differences — derived 13 September 2026
Method
Mean pairwise Jaccard distance over the lowercased word sets of the cleared translations of each verse. A verse is marked as worded differently when its score falls in the top third of the corpus — the cut set out in Analysis details.
As at
13 September 2026, 10:56 UTC
Gate
verify/divergence_gate.py re-derives and fails on drift
The platform does not say which is right, and does not
characterise what the difference means. The renderings are placed
together so the difference is visible; reading it is the reader's work.
7 sources
stand behind this page. Each is listed once, in the order the page first
cites it, with the licence it was cleared under and what was actually read.
Nothing on this page rests on a source that is not here.
Source Tanzil Qur'an text (Uthmani) · Uthmani, Version 1.1
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 ayahs. The bismillah is delivered as a separate `bismillah` attribute on ayah 1 and is NOT fused into the ayah text. 112 surahs carry one: every surah except al-Fatiha, where the bismillah is ayah 1:1 itself, and at-Tawba, which has none. Sourced from the XML output; the plain-text output of the same release DOES fuse it, which is defect D1.
CLEARED. Licence read verbatim from the block embedded in this very file. Ingested exactly as shipped: no normalisation, no stripping of marks, no Unicode recomposition.
Parsed structurally from the EPUB: an h3 names the surah, one p per verse with its number in its own span. An unnumbered p is the basmala and is not a verse, except in surah 1 where the basmala IS verse 1. 112 unnumbered paragraphs were found, which is 114 surahs less surah 1 and surah 9. Text is stored VERBATIM: NFC normalisation and XML entity unescaping only, because CC BY-ND forbids modification.
CLEARED on a licence read first-hand from the translator's own download page, not from an aggregator. Tanzil also hosts this translation, but under a blanket "non-commercial purposes only" term that directs the user to the translator or publisher for permission - a hosting disclaimer, not a grant - so the grant was taken from the licensor directly. The "God" edition was ingested; ClearQuran also publishes an "Allah" edition, differing in how the divine name is rendered, which is not ingested.
CLEARED ON THE WORK, WITH TWO RECORDED CAVEATS ON THIS COPY. (1) Rights basis is the expired copyright term, NOT the redistributing repository's licence. That repository dedicates its contents to the public domain under the Unlicense while also redistributing plainly in-copyright translations (Abdel Haleem, Saheeh International, The Study Quran), so it is dedicating rights it cannot hold and its blanket grant is not relied upon here. (2) The file declares its own upstream as tanzil.net, and Tanzil attaches a non-commercial condition to its TRANSLATION distributions, though not to its Qur'anic text. Since Pickthall's copyright has expired, nobody holds rights in these words and no licence is required from anyone; Tanzil's terms are a contract binding those who download from Tanzil, which we did not. The chain is nonetheless not spotless and Anwar may prefer a clean digitisation of the 1930 printing. NOT VERIFIED: that this digital text matches the 1930 first printing rather than a later revised edition. No page images were collated. Recorded as unverified rather than presented as established. SERVED TEXT DIFFERS FROM THE CITED FILE AT ONE VERSE, 37:97: the file reads "red-hotfire" (a glued token, also in Gutenberg #16955); the served row reads "red-hot fire", restored 2026-09-13 from Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (London: George Allen & Unwin, printed for Alfred A. Knopf; 1930), p. 460, XXXVII 97 - scan archive.org in.ernet.dli.2015.216140, PDF page 475; banked data/derivation-sources/pickthall-1930-dli-2015.216140-text.pdf (sha256 70e81146c97fa3a590243a82e04e349108546074787e2551a78c616202138870) on Anwar Malik's grant.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. The digital edition's upstream is not stated by the redistributor and the printing is unverified. No statement of purpose is recorded for Palmer because none was sourced from his own preface in this pass; nothing is asserted on his behalf.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. TWO edition caveats. (1) The upstream is not stated by the redistributor. (2) Rodwell's own edition PRESENTS THE SURAHS IN HIS OWN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, not the mushaf order — he says so in his preface. This digital text is keyed to mushaf order, so it derives from a restored-order printing (such as the Everyman edition) rather than from Rodwell's own arrangement. Which printing is not stated and has not been established.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. The digital edition's upstream is NOT STATED by the redistributor, so the printing it represents is unverified; Sale's text was reprinted and re-edited many times between 1734 and 1900. Recorded as unverified rather than assumed to be the first edition.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 ayahs. The bismillah is delivered as a separate `bismillah` attribute on ayah 1 and is NOT fused into the ayah text. 112 surahs carry one: every surah except al-Fatiha, where the bismillah is ayah 1:1 itself, and at-Tawba, which has none. Sourced from the XML output; the plain-text output of the same release DOES fuse it, which is defect D1.
CLEARED. Parallel edition, held in ayah_text_variants. It sits alongside the Uthmani spine for search normalisation and is never used to correct it.