Arabic Keyboard & Arabizi Converter

How to type Arabic online

1. 1Click the on-screen keys to type Arabic letters, harakat and punctuation.
2. 2Or open the Latin tab and type phonetically — 'kayfa 7alak' becomes كيف حالك as you type.
3. 3Edit freely in the text box; the cursor behaves exactly as it would with a real keyboard.
4. 4Press Copy, then paste the Arabic into any app, message or document.

Two ways to type Arabic

The on-screen keyboard follows the standard Arabic layout, so if you already know where the letters sit you will feel at home immediately. The harakat — fatha, kasra, damma, sukun, shadda and the tanween — have their own row, and the numerals are the Eastern Arabic forms ٠ to ٩.

The Latin tab is for everyone else. Type the way people already write Arabic in chat and it converts as you go. For most people this is far faster than hunting for individual keys, especially on a phone.

How Arabizi conversion works

Arabizi — also called Franco-Arabic or the Arabic chat alphabet — uses digits to stand in for Arabic sounds that Latin letters cannot represent. The digits were chosen because they look like the letters they replace: 3 resembles ع, 7 resembles ح, 5 stands for خ, 9 for ص, 6 for ط and 2 for the hamza.

The converter handles those digits along with the usual digraphs: sh for ش, kh for خ, gh for غ, th for ث and dh for ذ. It also applies a few conventions of written Arabic — the definite article 'al-' or 'el-' becomes ال, a word ending in '-ah' takes ta marbuta ة, and short vowels inside a word are dropped, because Arabic script does not write them.

Where it will not be perfect

Transliteration is a considered guess, not a translation. Arabizi has never had a single standard, so the same word gets spelled several different ways, and the distinction between long and short vowels is often ambiguous in Latin letters.

Names are the hardest case of all. When a spelling comes out wrong, switch to the keyboard tab and fix the individual letters — the text box stays fully editable at every point, and the two tabs write into the same text.

Why not just install an Arabic keyboard?

If you write Arabic every day, do install one. A system keyboard will always be faster than clicking keys on a screen, and every modern operating system includes an Arabic layout at no cost.

This tool is for the other situations: a shared or work computer where you cannot change the settings, an occasional message to a relative, a student checking a homework sentence, or a device whose language settings you would rather not disturb.

Your text stays on your device

Every keystroke, every conversion and every copy happens in your own browser. There is no account, no server round trip and no logging — the page would keep working with your network cable unplugged.

That matters for anything personal. Messages, names, addresses and drafts typed here are never transmitted anywhere, and closing the tab is enough to erase them completely.

Frequently asked questions