Formulas — the Qur'an's recurring phrases
Every sequence of three, four, or five consecutive words that recurs anywhere in the Qur'an, with every place it occurs — counted mechanically, two ways.
The root view follows sequences of consonantal roots, so a phrase counts as recurring even when its inflection varies — "gardens beneath which rivers flow" appears with different case endings but one root sequence. The surface view follows the written words themselves (vowel marks set aside), which is the only way to see particle-heavy phrases like the address "yā ayyuhā alladhīna āmanū" — its words carry no roots at all.
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Counted from the bundled Leeds Quranic Arabic Corpus v0.4
morphology — every figure here is reproducible from the data this
site ships (scripts/build-formulas.mjs). What is
counted is recurrence, nothing more: whether a recurring
phrase is a "formula" in the technical, oral-formulaic sense is a
scholarly judgment about composition, argued in the literature
(●
Bannister 2014, on Sources) — this
page does not make it.
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Formulaic density ●
What share of each verse's words belong to a recurring phrase, operationalizing the central quantity in Bannister's computerised oral-formulaic study. Every surah's mean is tested against a length-matched resampling of the whole corpus (10,000 draws, seeded), pooled into one Benjamini-Hochberg correction across all 228 candidates (114 surahs x 2 streams) rather than judged surah by surah.
A survivor means this surah's coverage is higher than length-matched chance predicts — not that it is formulaic in the technical oral-formulaic-theory sense, a scholarly judgment argued in Bannister 2014, not settled by this count. Full per-surah, per-verse table: Export.