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
These are nothing but names, which you have devised, you and your ancestors, for which God sent down no authority. They follow nothing but assumptions, and what the ego desires, even though guidance has come to them from their Lord.
Translation Talal Itani, ClearQuran·Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1875–1936 · published 1930
They are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers, for which Allah hath revealed no warrant. They follow but a guess and that which (they) themselves desire. And now the guidance from their Lord hath come unto them
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
They are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers! God has sent down no authority for them! They do but follow suspicion and what their souls lust after!- And yet there has come to them guidance from their Lord
Sources
Translation Edward Henry Palmer, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
These are mere names: ye and your fathers named them thus: God hath not sent down any warranty in their regard. A mereconceit and their own impulses do they follow. Yet hath "the guidance" from their Lord come to them
Sources
Translation John Medows Rodwell, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
They are no other than empty names, which ye and your fathers have named goddesses. God hath not revealed concerning them any thing to authorize their worship. They follow no other than a vainopinion, and what their souls desire: Yet hath the truedirection come unto them from their Lord
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
Ata s'janë gjë tjetër veçse emra (idhujsh), të cilët ua keni vënë vetë ju dhe etërit tuaj, gjë për të cilën nuk ju ka sjellë Allahu kurrfarë dëshmie. Ata ndjekin vetëm hamendjen dhe atë që ua ka ëndja, ndonëse u ka ardhur udhëzimi prej Zotit të tyre.
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
এগুলো তো কতিপয় (অর্থহীন) নাম, যে নামগুলো তোমরা ও তোমাদের পিতৃপুরুষেরা রেখেছ। এ ব্যাপারে আল্লাহ কোন দলিল-প্রমাণ নাযিল করেননি। তারা তো কেবল অনুমান এবং নিজেদের কুপ্রবৃত্তির যা চায়, তার অনুসরণ করে। অথচ তাদের কাছে তাদের রবের পক্ষ থেকে (নবীর মাধ্যমে) হিদায়াত এসেছে।
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
To su samo imena koja ste im vi i preci vaši nadjenuli; Allah o njima nikakav dokaz nije poslao; oni se povode samo za pretpostavkama i onim za čim duše žude, a već im dođe od Gospodara njihova Uputa.
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
To su samo imena koja ste im vi i predci vaši nadjenuli; Allah o njima nikakav dokaz nije poslao; oni se povode samo za pretpostavkama i onim za čim duše žude, a već im dođe od Gospodara njihova Uputa.
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
ɗi ngonah si wonah inɗe ɗe innuɗon onon e baabiraaɓe mon Alla jippinaani heen daliil ɓe ndewaani si wona sikke e mbelamme pittaali ko goongo peewal arii e maɓɓe ummaade to Joom mu'en.
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
ისინი [ეს კერპები] მხოლოდ სახელებია, რომლებიც თქვენ და თქვენმა მამებმა დაარქვით. ალლაჰს არ მოუვლენია მათზე არანაირი მტკიცებულება. და ისინი მხოლოდ ვარაუდებსა და საკუთარი სულების სურვილებს მიჰყვებიან, მაშინ როცა მათ თავიანთი უფლისგან მოუვიდათ სწორი გზის ჩვენება.
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
Das sind nur Namen, die ihr genannt habt, ihr und eure Väter, für die Allah (aber) keine Ermächtigung herabgesandt hat. Sie folgen nur Vermutungen und dem, wozu sie selbst neigen. Und es ist bereits von ihrem Herrn die Rechtleitung zu ihnen gekommen.
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
Αυτά τα (είδωλα) δεν είναι παρά μόνο κάποια ονόματα, που έχετε επινοήσει εσείς και οι πρόγονοί σας, για τα οποία ο Αλλάχ δεν έχει στείλει καμία απόδειξη! Δεν ακολουθούν (οι ειδωλολάτρες) παρά μόνο εικασίες και ό,τι επιθυμούν οι ψυχές (τους). Πράγματι, έχει έρθει σ' αυτούς η καθοδήγηση από τον Κύριό τους (με τον Προφήτη Του, αλλά δεν την ακολουθούν).
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
ये (मूर्तियाँ) कुछ नामों के सिवा कुछ भी नहीं हैं, जो तुमने तथा तुम्हारे बाप-दादा ने रख लिए हैं। अल्लाह ने इनका कोई प्रमाण नहीं उतारा है। ये लोग केवल अटकल[7] के और उन चीज़ों के पीछे चल रहे हैं जो उनके दिल चाहते हैं। जबकि निःसंदेह उनके पास उनके पालनहार की ओर से मार्गदर्शन आ चुका है।
Translated by Azizul Haq Al-Omari
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.5
Italiano · Italian
Ma non sono che nomi, inventati da voi e dai vostri padri, a cui Allāh non ha mai attribuito nessuna autorità. In verità, non seguono che le proprie supposizioni e ciò che i loro animi desiderano, anche se è già stata indicata loro da Allāh la Retta Via.
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
23. Jie tėra vardai, kuriuos jūs sukūrėte, jūs ir jūsų tėvai, kuriems Allahas nedavė jokio įgaliojimo. Jie seka tik spėlionėmis ir savo troškimais, kuomet (tikras) vedimas yra juos pasiekęs iš jų Viešpaties!
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
Это — всего лишь имена, которыми нарекли их вы и ваши отцы. Аллах не ниспосылал о них никакого довода. Они следуют лишь предположениям и тому, чего жаждут их души, — а ведь к ним уже пришло верное руководство от их Господа.
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
То су само имена која сте киповима наденули ви и ваши преци; Аллах о њима није послао никакав доказ; они се поводе само за претпоставкама и оним за чим њихове душе жуде, а већ им је дошла Упута од њиховог Господара.
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
Hayo hayakuwa ila ni majina mliyowapa nyinyi na baba zenu. Mwenyezi Mungu hakuleta uthibitisho wowote juu ya hayo. Hawafuati ila dhana tu na kipendacho nafsi. Na kwa yakini uongofu ulikwisha wafikia kutoka kwa Mola wao Mlezi.
Issued by the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
Svenska · Swedish
Dessa [avgudar] är bara namn som ni och era förfäder hittat på; Gud har inte gett er befogenhet till det. De följer bara lösa antaganden och vad de själva önskar, trots att de har fått vägledning från sin Herre!
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
Bunlar (putlar) sizin ve atalarınızın taktığı isimlerden başka bir şey değildir. Allah, onlar hakkında bir delil indirmemiştir. Onlar, ancak zanna ve nefislerinin arzusuna uyuyorlar. Oysa, onlara Rableri tarafından yol gösterici gelmiştir.
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
دراصل یہ صرف نام ہیں جو تم نے اور تمہارے باپ دادوں نے ان کے رکھ لیے ہیں اللہ نے ان کی کوئی دلیل نہیں اتاری۔ یہ لوگ تو صرف اٹکل کے اور اپنی نفسانی خواہشوں کے پیچھے پڑے ہوئے ہیں۔ اور یقیناً ان کے رب کی طرف سے ان کے پاس ہدایت آ چکی 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.
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 · George Sale0.69
Talal Itani · John Medows Rodwell0.65
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · John Medows Rodwell0.63
Talal Itani · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.63
John Medows Rodwell · George Sale0.60
Edward Henry Palmer · George Sale0.59
Edward Henry Palmer · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.57
Edward Henry Palmer · John Medows Rodwell0.56
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · George Sale0.55
Talal Itani · Edward Henry Palmer0.47
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.