Divine Discourses

How far apart are two surahs?

Each square compares two surahs by the roots they use and how often. Darker means the two use more different vocabularies than random reassignment of the same verses would give. Click a square, or pick two surahs, to see the numbers.

Closest and most distant pairs

Pairs where both surahs have at least 500 rooted tokens, so short-text noise does not decide the ranking. Both lists are ordered by excess over the null, smallest first and largest first; the raw distance is shown beside it.

How to read this

The distance is the square root of the Jensen-Shannon divergence between two surahs' root counts, from 0 (same proportions) to 1 (no root in common). ● Short surahs look distant from everything by arithmetic alone, so each distance is compared with what pooling both surahs' verses and reassigning them at random would give (2,000 draws), and the excess over that null is what the colors show. A large excess means different vocabularies, not different themes or styles; the null keeps verse counts, not token counts, so pairs whose verses differ in length are calibrated less well. ● The full table, with p and q values, is on Export as surah-distance.