SubhanAllah

What the word actually says

The root is س ب ح. Tasbih is declaring Allah free of every fault, every deficiency and every partner. It is a negation before it is a praise: you are saying what Allah is not.

That is why "glory be to Allah" undersells it. Glory is something you add; tanzih is something you clear away. The phrase removes from Allah anything unworthy of Him, and the praise follows from that rather than the other way round.

This is also why tasbih pairs so naturally with tahmid. SubhanAllah clears, Alhamdulillah credits. The narrations below almost always keep them together.

Two words, light on the tongue

The best known hadith about tasbih is not about the single word. It is about a longer pair.

Abu Hurayrah reported the Prophet saying: "Two words, light on the tongue, heavy on the scale, beloved to the Most Merciful: SubhanAllahi wa bihamdihi, SubhanAllahil-Azim." Sahih al-Bukhari 6682, book 83 hadith 59.

Two things are worth noticing. The hadith gives no count, so the hundred people often attach to it is common practice rather than a narrated number. And it sits in Bukhari's Book of Oaths and Vows, not in his book of invocations, because the chapter is about a man who swears not to speak and then makes dhikr.

A hundred a day

This one does carry a number.

Abu Hurayrah reported: "Whoever says SubhanAllahi wa bihamdihi a hundred times a day, his sins are wiped away even if they were like the foam of the sea." Sahih al-Bukhari 6405, book 80 hadith 100.

Bukhari titled that chapter بَابُ فَضْلِ التَّسْبِيحِ, the virtue of tasbih. The phrase here is the shorter one, SubhanAllahi wa bihamdihi, not the pair from the previous hadith. People routinely count the pair a hundred times on the strength of this narration; the narration names only the short form.

The one that is misquoted

You will often read that SubhanAllah fills what is between the heavens and the earth. The hadith does not say that.

Abu Malik al-Ash'ari reported: "Cleanliness is half of faith, and Alhamdulillah fills the scale, and SubhanAllah and Alhamdulillah fill what is between the heavens and the earth." Sahih Muslim 223, book 2 hadith 1.

It is the two together that fill it. Alhamdulillah alone fills the scale; SubhanAllah alone is not given a measure in this hadith. The Arabic even preserves the narrator's own uncertainty, تَمْلآنِ أَوْ تَمْلأُ, wavering between the dual and the singular, which is the kind of detail a paraphrase loses.

The palm tree, and a grading two authorities disagree on

Jabir narrated that the Prophet said: "Whoever says SubhanAllahil-Azim wa bihamdih, a date palm is planted for him in Paradise." Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3464, book 48 hadith 95.

This is one of the most shared hadith on the subject, and its grading is not settled. At-Tirmidhi himself calls it hasan sahih gharib and notes he knows it only through Abu az-Zubayr from Jabir. The Darussalam edition on sunnah.com grades the same narration da'if.

Both gradings are recorded here because both exist. Nothing on this page depends on it, and you can decide what weight to give it knowing that a single chain is what the disagreement turns on.

The 33 after salah

SubhanAllah 33 times after each fard prayer is the count most people know, and it comes from Abu Hurayrah's narration in Sahih Muslim 597a: 33 tasbih, 33 tahmid, 33 takbir, ninety-nine in all, then the tahlil to complete a hundred.

That is one of at least three narrated distributions, and the others do not agree with it. Rather than compress that here, it has its own page: why 33 sets out all three with their sources.

How it is spelled

There is no single correct transliteration, because Arabic is not written in Latin letters. Subhanallah, Subhan Allah, SubhanAllah and Subhaan Allah are the same phrase.

Common misspellings, subanallah, subhannallah, sobhanallah, subuhanallah, are the same phrase too. If you searched one of those and landed here, nothing is wrong with your spelling.

Where to go next

For the longer form and its own narrations, see SubhanAllahi wa bihamdihi. For the counts after prayer, see dhikr after salah and why 33. For what tasbih means as a practice rather than a phrase, see what is tasbih in Islam.