Choose the Right Arabic Typing Style

There is no standard way to write Arabic in Latin letters. Some people write khubz, some write 5ubz, and both mean خبز. So the keyboard offers four typing styles, and picking the one that matches how you already spell is the difference between typing fluently and fighting the tool.

The styles differ in one specific way: how they handle the Arabic letters English has no single letter for — خ, ث, ذ, ش, غ, and the heavy consonants. Everything else is broadly the same.

What each style is for

Style	Written for someone who spells	Marker
Traditional	With an apostrophe after the base letter	s' → ش, H' → خ
English	With English digraphs	sh → ش, kh → خ
French	With French habits	ch → ش, ou → و
Arabizi	In chat spelling, with digits	5 → خ, 9 → ق

Traditional is the default, and it is the one the rest of this site’s examples assume unless they say otherwise.

The same letters, four different results

This is the part worth seeing rather than reading about. Each row is one input typed into the editor with nothing else changed:

You type	Traditional	English	French	Arabizi
slam	سلام	سلام	سلام	سلام
khbz	كهبز	خبز	خبز	كهبز
thlath	تهلاته	ثلاث	ثلاث	ثلاث
ghali	عهالي	غالي	غالي	gهالي
chai	چهاي	cهاي	شاي	cهاي
nour	نouر	نouر	نور	نouر
3ali	3الي	عالي	عالي	عالي
7abib	7ابيب	حابيب	حابيب	حابيب

Two things stand out. Ordinary consonant words like slam behave identically everywhere — the styles only diverge on the letters they were built to disagree about. And where a style does not recognise a sequence, it writes the letters separately rather than guessing: kh in Traditional is genuinely k then h, which is كه.

Traditional: the apostrophe style

The base letter, then ' for the version with dots.

Type	Get		Type	Get
s'	ش		t'	ث
H'	خ		d'	ذ
g'	غ		h'	ة

It takes a few minutes to learn and it is unambiguous afterwards — every dotted letter follows the same rule, and nothing is a digraph, so no word can be read two ways. H'bz gives خبز, d'hb gives ذهب, g'rb gives غرب.

English: the digraph style

Write the digraph the way you would in an English message.

Type	Get		Type	Get
sh	ش		th	ث
kh	خ		dh	ذ
gh	غ

So shkra gives شكرا, khbz gives خبز, dhhb gives ذهب. This style also understands the chat digits without any setting being turned on: 3id mbark produces عيد مبارك straight away.

One caution: the digraphs are the only thing this style changes. It is not a “type it how it sounds” mode, and the vowel rule still applies — alhamd lillah gives الهامد ليللاه, because every a and i is still a real letter. You still spell the consonant skeleton.

French: ch and ou

Built for people whose Latin spelling of Arabic comes through French. ch gives ش, so chai produces شاي, and ou gives و, so nour produces نور — the only style where that vowel pair works. The kh, th, gh and dh digraphs work here too.

Arabizi: the chat style

The spelling used in messages across the Arabic-speaking world, where digits stand in for letters that Latin has no shape for:

Type	Get		Type	Get
2	أ		6	ط
3	ع		7	ح
5	خ		9	ق

5bz gives خبز, 9lb gives قلب, 6yb gives طيب. Not every digit is a letter — 8 has no mapping and stays as it is.

Picking one

Ask which of these you would write without thinking, if you were texting a friend in Latin letters:

• shukran → English
• chokran → French
• shokran with a 5 or a 7 elsewhere in the message → Arabizi
• None of them, and you would rather learn one consistent rule → Traditional

Then stay with it. Switching styles mid-document does not retranslate what you already typed — the Arabic already in the box stays exactly as it is, and only what you type next follows the new style. That is usually what you want, but it means a half-finished word can end up split between two conventions.

Your choice is remembered on the device you set it on, so you only do this once per browser.

If none of them fits

You are not limited to the four. Under Make it yours you can tell the keyboard that a specific key should write a specific Arabic letter — that typing 7 should give ح, for instance — and your rules sit on top of whichever style you have chosen. The custom mappings tutorial walks through it.

Next step

Open the Arabic keyboard, find Typing settings, and type the same short word in two different styles. Whichever one needed less thinking is your answer.