سبّح
Sabbaḥa
To glorify God and declare Him free of every fault, with praise and thanks for what He has done.
What it means
The verb sabbaḥa means to declare God exalted above every imperfection, and it is closely joined with praise and thanks. The Quran says that everything in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him (17:44), and it commands the believers to glorify Him morning and evening (33:42). The verbal noun is tasbīḥ, and the phrase subḥāna Allāh is its most familiar form. Muslims practise tasbīḥ inside the ritual prayer, in the bowing and the prostration, and after the prayer, where many repeat subḥāna Allāh thirty-three times. Faruqi lists the verb among the words whose sense of thanking God for His deeds is lost when it is rendered only as “to praise”.
Often misunderstood as
Rendering the verb as plain praise loses the sense of declaring God free of every defect and of thanking Him for what He has done.
What the sources say
The Quran uses the verb in the past, present and imperative forms, and so shows that glorification belongs to all creation at all times (57:1, 62:1). The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) taught that two phrases light on the tongue and heavy in the scale are subḥāna Allāh wa bi-ḥamdihi and subḥāna Allāh al-ʿAẓīm (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim).
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 34, listed as SABBAḤA. The definition is restated here.