Moving forward with the translation of the prayer before eating from our Daily Athkaar series, we’ll now go through the meaning of اللَّهُمَّ بَارِكْ لَنَا.

اللَّهُمَّ

Allahumma – Oh God

This is often how we begin supplications / prayers / du’as.  It’s a way of directing your speech to God.

Another way that we start our du’as is by saying رَبَْنَا (rabbanaa), which means “Our Lord”.

بَارِكْ

baarik – bless

This is a command verb, which means it’s something that you’re directly asking the person you’re speaking to to do.  In this case, you’re asking God to bless something.

The root letters in this word are ب (baa), ر (raa) and ك (kaaf).  Other words that have those root letters will also have the meaning of blessing in them.  For example, بَرَكَة (barakah) means “blessing” and مُبَارَك (mubaarak) means “blessed”.

لَنَا

lanaa – for us

This is another case of two words which look like one. لَ (la) means “for” and نَا (naa) means “us”

In other places you might also see:

لَهُمْ (lahum) “for them”

لَكُمْ (lakum) “for you (plural)”

لَكَ (laka) “for you (singular masculine)”

So here it is in summary:

اللَّهُمَّ بَارِكْ لَنَا means “Oh God, bless for us”.

Next, we’ll translate فَيمَا رَزَقْتَنَا.

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This post is part of a word-by-word translation series, which starts here.  This series was inspired by language learning lessons which I picked up during my trip to India.