Expressing frequency in Arabic: The اسم المرة

In Arabic, there is an elegant way to express how often someone has done something.

Let’s take a look at these two sentences:

1. قَفَزَ اللّاعِبُ قَفْزًا
2. قَفَزَ اللّاعِبُ قَفْزَةً

What is the difference?

The first two words are the same and mean the player jumped. So, what about the object? Foremost, both sentences are correct, but the meaning is slightly different.

In Arabic, there is a way to emphasize if a person has done…

1. Something in general (الْمَفْعُول الْمُطْلَق): قَفَزَ اللّاعِبُ قَفْزًا = the player jumped
2. Something only once or a certain number of times: قَفَزَ اللّاعِبُ قَفْزَةً = the player jumped once

Examples of the اسم المرة

If you use the regular مَصْدَر after a verb to emphasize an action, it means you are saying something in general or that you don’t know how often the action was being done. Such forms do emphasize the action and are called absolute object (مَفْعُولٌ مُطْلَقٌ).

➤ In Arabic, however, there is a special form to emphasize the amount of times an action was being done.

The form فَعْلة is called اِسْم الْمَرّة (ism al-marra; noun of frequency or occurrence) and is a form of a مَصْدَر. You can recognize this form easily: It is the مَصْدَر plus a ة. The plural is built by the usual pattern for feminine nouns: ات. Since it has to be the object of a sentence, it has to be مَنْصُوب.

You will find more examples and tricky situations in the book Arabic for Nerds. Notice that there are many types of masdar forms as well that are a great and handy tool to express certain ideas nicely.

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