Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the unique feature and distinctive characteristic of the word “Qaria (village)” as used in the Qur’ān, that sets it apart from similar words (such as medina (city) and balda (town)), thus, contributes to the linguistic inimitability of the Qur’ān. We aim to argue in favor of the fact that the selection of words in the Qur’anic texts is not haphazard; rather it conforms to the contextual significations, the lexical semantic properties of the words and the social message they convey. To achieve this, the paper adopted lexical analysis of contextual approach that identifies the Qur’anic lexical phrases where the word ‘qaria’ is found as chunks and, thus, take into consideration the three-fold aspect of the word, those are: its semantic content, the forms of its derivational and inflectional affixes, and its contexts.