Arabic Keyboard
The standard Arabic layout, typed with your mouse or with the keys you already have: click a letter and it lands in the box, or focus the box and type, where h is alef and q is dad, the way an Arabic keycap set is printed. Every key inserts one Unicode codepoint and the page names it as you press it, so what you copy is the letters themselves and not a legacy presentation form that pastes in looking right and then fails to match a search. The box runs right to left, a control turns it round for a mostly Latin draft, and the harakat row is one click away when you want the marks. All of it happens in this tab: nothing is uploaded, transliterated, spell checked or corrected, there is no account, and there is no limit on how much you write.
Click a key, or type on your own keyboard with this box focused.
With the box focused, your own letter keys type Arabic: this is the standard Arabic layout, so h is alef and q is dad, and the key printed under each character is the one that types it, with ⇧ meaning hold Shift as well. Space, the digits and Backspace pass straight through, and Ctrl or Command shortcuts still copy and paste. The punctuation keys do not pass through: this layout carries letters on them, so comma types waw, full stop types zain and slash types zah, the three people hit by reflex. Shift with slash gives the Arabic question mark, and the Arabic comma and semicolon have their own keys on the fourth row. The لا you may be looking for is two letters, lam then alef: type them in order and the font joins them. Turn Diacritics on for the harakat row, which your shift keys type either way.
What comes out
- ض U+0636
- مرحبا
- مرحبا hello
Common questions
- How do I type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard?
- Two ways on this page, and neither needs anything installed. Click the keys with your mouse, or click into the box and type on the keys you already have: this page maps them the way the standard Arabic layout does, so a is sheen, s is seen, d is yeh, f is beh, g is lam, h is alef, j is teh, k is noon and l is meem, while the row above gives q dad, w sad, e theh, r qaf, t feh, y ghain, u ain, i heh, o khah and p hah. The key printed under each character on screen is the key that types it, and a shift arrow beside it means hold Shift as well, so the board doubles as the map. Space, the digits and Backspace pass straight through and do what they always do, and Ctrl or Command shortcuts still copy and paste. The punctuation keys are the exception, because this layout carries Arabic letters on them: comma types waw, full stop types zain, slash types zah, semicolon types kaf, apostrophe types tah, the bracket keys type jeem and dal, and the backtick types thal. The first three are the ones people hit by reflex, so ending an Arabic sentence with the full stop key gives you ز rather than a dot. For Arabic punctuation, Shift and slash gives the Arabic question mark, Shift and K the Arabic comma and Shift and P the Arabic semicolon, and all three also sit on the fourth row of the board. Windows and macOS both ship this same layout in their keyboard settings if you want it everywhere; this page is for the times you cannot or would rather not change the machine you are on.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The layout is part of the page and the typing happens in your browser, so there is nothing to upload and no account to make. Several of the older Arabic keyboard pages post what you type to a server to convert it; this one has nowhere to post it to, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with no connection. Your draft and the direction you picked are kept in this browser alone so the page opens where you left it, and the Start over button at the top of the page forgets both.
- Why do the letters look different at the start, middle and end of a word?
- Because Arabic joins, and the joining is drawing rather than spelling. Each letter is one codepoint, and the font draws it in the shape its neighbours call for: initial, medial, final or isolated. Beh is U+0628 whether it opens a word or closes one, so the character you copy never changes, only the picture of it does. That is why this page inserts the letter itself and never a presentation form from the compatibility block: text made of those forms looks correct in the page it came from and then refuses to match a search, a spell check or another font.
- How do I add diacritics, the harakat?
- Set Diacritics to On and a row of marks appears: fatha, damma, kasra, sukun, shadda and the three tanween. A mark attaches to the letter before it, so type the letter first and then the mark: kaf then fatha gives one letter carrying one mark, and the character count reads 2, because a mark is its own codepoint rather than a different letter. On a physical keyboard the same marks sit on the shift layer of the Arabic layout, Shift and Q for fatha, Shift and E for damma, Shift and A for kasra, Shift and X for sukun, Shift and the tilde key for shadda, and those work here whether or not the row is showing. Nothing is added that you did not press.
- How do I type لا, and where are أ, إ and آ?
- لا is not a letter: it is lam followed by alef, two codepoints that the font joins into one shape. Type ل then ا, which is g then h on your keyboard, and you have it. The physical Arabic layout puts a combined lam-alef key on B and this board leaves it out on purpose, because every key here inserts exactly one codepoint and that one would insert two. The alefs that carry a hamza or a madda are single letters with their own codepoints, so أ, إ and آ each get a key on the fourth row along with the tatweel and the Arabic comma, semicolon and question mark. On a physical keyboard they are Shift and H, Shift and Y, and Shift and N.
- What exactly gets copied?
- The characters in the box, in the order they were typed, with nothing added: no direction marks, no presentation forms, no invisible padding. That is called logical order, and it is what every text field, document and message app expects, because each of them lays Arabic out right to left on its own using the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. The RTL and LTR control here changes how the box is laid out for you while you write; it adds no characters and it changes nothing about what lands on your clipboard. If a page ever hands you Arabic that pastes in backwards or will not match a search, that page copied the drawn shapes instead of the letters.
Each key inserts one specific Unicode codepoint, and what you copy is exactly what you clicked, in the order you clicked it. It cannot know which fonts your reader has, and it does not spell check, transliterate or add diacritics you did not type.