Colour-coded Tajweed
The same verses you already read, with the Tajweed rules marked in colour. Use it to find a rule in real text — then switch the colours off and see if it still holds.
Tool
Loading the surah…
Colour-coded Uthmani text from Tanzil.net via UmmahAPI. Colours follow the common colour-coded Mushaf convention; different printings use different palettes.
What does colour-coded Tajweed mean?
A colour-coded Mushaf prints certain letters in colour to show where a Tajweed rule applies. Green might mark a ghunnah, red a prolongation, blue a letter that is skipped. Nothing about the text changes; the colour is an annotation laid over it, the way a highlighter marks a textbook. Once you know the key, you can see at a glance that the noon in a particular word is not read plainly.
This is a modern printing convention, not part of the revealed text, and there is no single agreed palette. A Mushaf printed in Damascus and one printed in Karachi will use different colours for the same rule. So learn the rules, and treat the colours as a prompt rather than as the authority.
The rules the colours usually mark
| Rule | What happens | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Ghunnah | A nasal sound held for about two counts | On نّ and مّ carrying a shaddah |
| Idgham | One letter merges into the next | Noon saakinah or tanween before ي ر م ل و ن |
| Ikhfa | The sound is hidden between clear and merged, with a light nasal | Noon saakinah or tanween before fifteen letters |
| Iqlab | Noon becomes a meem sound | Noon saakinah or tanween before ب |
| Qalqalah | A slight bounce or echo on a resting letter | On ق ط ب ج د with sukoon |
| Madd | A vowel held longer than its normal length | Two, four or six counts depending on the type |
Each of these has conditions and exceptions that a colour cannot express. The colour tells you that something happens here; it does not tell you which madd this is or how many counts it takes. That is why colour-coded printings are a companion to study rather than a replacement for it — see what Tajweed is and Tajweed for beginners for the rules themselves.
How to use a colour-coded text well
- Learn one rule at a time from a proper explanation, not from the colours.
- Then read a surah here and hunt for that one rule. Ignore the other colours entirely.
- Read the marked words aloud, slowly, and check what your mouth actually does.
- Once the rule is automatic, move to the next one. Most learners can hold three or four rules in active attention at once — no more.
The colours are a scaffold, and scaffolds come down. A reader who has learned only to react to colour will stall the first time they open an ordinary Mushaf. Plan for that from the start: after a surah feels comfortable, switch the colours off with the toggle above and read the same surah plain. If the rules survive that, you have actually learned them.
Why the rules exist at all
Tajweed is not decoration and it is not optional refinement. The rules describe how the Quran was recited by the Prophet, transmitted through unbroken chains of reciters, and they preserve the sound of the text across centuries and languages. Reading without them tends to pull the Arabic towards the sounds of whatever language you already speak, and enough of that drift changes words. A heavy letter read lightly is a different letter.
At the same time, no beginner is expected to apply everything at once. The obligation most scholars describe is to read in a way that does not distort the letters; the finer rules of prolongation and merging are learned over time, in order, and usually with someone listening. If you have no teacher, a colour-coded text plus a recording of a careful reciter is a reasonable second best — listen to the same verse you are looking at, and match what you hear.
Sources
- Colour-coded Uthmani text: Tanzil.net (CC BY 3.0), with Tajweed annotation as distributed by Quran.com.
- English translation: Saheeh International.
- Rule descriptions follow the standard teaching sequence of Ibn al-Jazari’s Muqaddimah as taught in contemporary Qaida and Tajweed primers.
- Data delivery: UmmahAPI.
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