Question

Surah 21 is named al-Anbiya' in the Holy Qur'an and translated by Yusef Ali in his English translation of the Holy Qur'an as "Prophets". In other places is translated as "prophets.  Is there a difference in meaning of these two words?

Answer

Masha’ Allah, that is a good question.  The word “prophet” comes from  (inform).  There are two forms of plurality in this noun, one is a regular plural of a male:  or .  The only difference between these two are their grammatical position in the sentence, they both are direct regular plurals.  The word  is an irregular plural of the word (prophet), but has the same exact meaning as .  

There are words in the Arabic that have more than one plural form, such as the word for women:  and , and the word for “prophets”  and  is one such word.