The nearer life, and how much of you it gets
Dunya is the world you are actually living in: the rent, the commute, the people at your table, the body that gets tired. The Qur'an treats all of it as given and real. In the middle of an instruction to work for what comes after, one verse stops to tell its listener "do not forget your share of this world", which is a strange line to find in a book people quote to prove the world is worthless.
The word carries the sense of what is nearer. It is the closer life, the one at hand, and the hereafter is the one still ahead. That is a statement about sequence and duration. Almost every verse here makes the same measurement in the same direction: this life is short, the next is lasting, so weigh what you spend yourself on accordingly.
In conversation the word usually arrives as a scold. Someone mentions a promotion or a flat they have saved for, and another person says dunya as though naming it settled the matter. The warning in these verses is narrower than that. It falls on deception, the moment the nearer life persuades you that it is the whole account and there is nothing after it to answer to. What the Qur'an calls the enjoyment of delusion is that persuasion at work.
So the correction on offer is about weight. Work, money, marriage and the ordinary pleasures all stay where they are; what changes is how much of you they are allowed to own. A person can hold a good job and a full house and still know which of their commitments will outlast them, and someone with very little can be as bound to the nearer life as anyone rich. The test runs through both.
These verses are also honest about how the world ends for each of us, which is why several of them turn to rain and green fields and then to dry stubble. Read them at a moment of gain and they steady you. Read them at a moment of loss and they say the loss was always in the nature of the thing, and that your account is held somewhere the loss cannot reach. For the same question approached from the side of what is enough, the verses on contentment sit close to this page, and money and provision takes up earning and spending directly.