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.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1875–1936 · published 1930
Lo! We have placed all that is on the earth as an ornament thereof that We may try them: which of them is best in conduct
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
John Medows Rodwell1808–1900 · published 1861
Verily, we have made all that is on earth as its adornment, that we might make trial who among mankind would excel in works
Sources
Translation John Medows Rodwell, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
Verily we have ordainedwhatsoever is on the earth for the ornament thereof, that we might make trial of men, and see which of them excelleth in works
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
Ne bëmë gjithçka që gjendet në Tokë stoli për të, për t'i provuar se cili prej tyre është më vepërmbarë.
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
নিশ্চয়ই আমি পৃথিবীর উপর যা কিছু আছে, তা তাকে শোভামণ্ডিত করার জন্য করেছি, যাতে আমি তাদের পরীক্ষা করি, তাদের মধ্যে কে আমলে সবচেয়ে উত্তম।
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
Sve što je na Zemlji Mi smo kao ukras njoj stvorili da iskušamo ljude ko će od njih bolje postupati,
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
Sve što je na Zemlji Mi smo kao ukras njoj stvorili da iskušamo ljude tko će od njih bolje postupati,
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
Minen min mbaɗii ko woni ko ka hoore leydi cuɗaari mayri, fii yo min mjarribo ɓe ko hommbo e maɓɓe ɓurata moƴƴin'de golle.
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
ჭეშმარიტად, ჩვენ ვქმენით ის, რაც მიწაზეა მის სამკაულად, რათა გამოვცადოთ ისინი [ადამიანები], თუ ვინ არის მათგან უკეთესი საქმეებით.
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
Wahrlich, Wir haben, was auf der Erde ist, zu einem Schmuck für sie gemacht, um sie zu prüfen (und festzustellen), wer von ihnen die besten Taten verrichtet.
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
Έχουμε κάνει ό,τι υπάρχει πάνω στη γη ως στολίδια γι' αυτήν, για να τους δοκιμάσουμε (τους ανθρώπους) ποιος απ' αυτούς θα πράττει καλύτερα (και περισσότερες καλές πράξεις).
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
निःसंदेह जो कुछ धरती के ऊपर है, हमने उसे उसकी शोभा बनाया है। ताकि हम उनका परीक्षण करें कि उनमें कौन कर्म की दृष्टि से सबसे अच्छा है?
Translated by Azizul Haq Al-Omari
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.5
Italiano · Italian
In verità abbiamo realizzato ciò che è sulla terra come abbellimento per metterli alla prova e per vedere chi agisce meglio.
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
7. Iš tiesų, Mes padarėme tai, kas yra ant žemės kaip puošmeną jai tam, kad Mes galėtume juos (žmoniją) išbandyti – kurie iš jų yra geriausi savo poelgiais [t. y. kurie daro gerus darbus geriausiu būdu, tai reiškia daryti juos (darbus) visiškai vardan Allaho ir Pranašo ﷺ nurodytais būdais].
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
Воистину, Мы сделали всё, что на земле, украшением для неё, чтобы испытать их — кто из них лучше по деяниям.
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
Све што је на Земљи Ми смо створили као украс да би искушали људе чија ће дела да буду боља.
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
Kwa hakika tumevifanya vilivyoko juu ya ardhi kuwa ni pambo lake ili tuwafanyie mtihani, ni nani kati yao ndio wenye vitendo vizuri zaidi.
Issued by the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
Svenska · Swedish
Vi har smyckat jorden med vackra ting för att pröva [människorna], och låta deras handlingar visa vilka som är de främsta bland dem;
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
İnsanların hangisi daha güzel amel işleyecek diye imtihan etmek için yeryüzünde bulunanları, oranın süsü yaptık.
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
روئے زمین پر جو کچھ[1] ہے ہم نے اسے زمین کی رونق کا باعﺚ بنایا ہے کہ ہم انہیں آزمالیں کہ ان میں سے کون نیک اعمال واﻻ ہے.
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.
Easy-read (simplified)maa lahum bihi min 'ilmin walaa li'aabaa'ihim kaburat kalimatan takhruju min afwaahihim in yaqooloona illaa kadhibaa
DIN 31635mā lahum bihi min ʿilmin walā liʾābāʾihim kaburat kalimatan taḫruǧu min ʾafwāhihim ʾin yaqūlūna ʾillā kaḏiban
Talal Itani2012 They have no knowledge of this, nor did their forefathers. Grave is the word that comes out of their mouths. They say nothing but a lie.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 (A thing) whereof they have no knowledge, nor (had) their fathers, Dreadful is the word that cometh out of their mouths. They speak naught but a lie
Edward Henry Palmer1880 They have no knowledge thereof, nor their fathers; a serious word it is that comes forth from their mouths! verily, they only speak a lie
John Medows Rodwell1861 No knowledge of this have either they or their fathers! A grievous saying to come out of their mouths! They speak no other than a lie
George Sale1734 of which matter they have no knowledge, neither had their fathers. A grievous saying it is, which proceedeth from their mouths: They speak no other than a lie
Talal Itani2012 Perhaps you may destroy yourself with grief, chasing after them, if they do not believe in this information.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 Yet it may be, if they believe not in this statement, that thou (Muhammad) wilt torment thy soul with grief over their footsteps
Edward Henry Palmer1880 Haply thou wilt grieve thyself to death for sorrow after them, if they believe not in this new revelation
John Medows Rodwell1861 And haply, if they believe not in this new revelation, thou wilt slay thyself, on their very footsteps, out of vexation
George Sale1734 Peradventure thou wilt kill thy self with grief after them, out of thy earnest zeal for their conversion, if they believe not in this new revelation of the Koran
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 —
0.63 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 · John Medows Rodwell0.83
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · John Medows Rodwell0.74
Edward Henry Palmer · John Medows Rodwell0.73
Talal Itani · George Sale0.71
John Medows Rodwell · George Sale0.66
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · George Sale0.62
Talal Itani · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.55
Edward Henry Palmer · George Sale0.55
Talal Itani · Edward Henry Palmer0.46
Edward Henry Palmer · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.44
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.
Sources, editions and licences for everything above
ReceiptsSource fact
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.