Hebrew Keyboard
The standard Israeli layout on the page, with the five final forms as keys of their own and a vowel-point row that attaches real combining marks to the letter before the caret. Click a key and the letter lands at the caret; write straight into the box and your own keyboard is left completely alone, because this is a keyboard and not a transliterator. The box runs right to left and the text is kept in logical order, the order you typed it, with no invisible direction characters added, so what you copy pastes correctly into a document, a form or a message. The counter separates Hebrew letters from vowel points, which is the number you need when a field has a length limit. All of it happens in this tab: nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is no limit on how much you write.
Vowel points attach to the letter before the caret
Click a key to type Hebrew, or write in the box with your own keyboard.
Click the keys, or write straight into the box: your own keys are left alone, so this page never turns Latin letters into Hebrew ones. The small letter on each keycap is where that letter sits on the standard Israeli layout, which is the layout Windows, macOS and Linux all ship, so the board doubles as a map if you decide to switch your machine over. The five final forms have their own keys (ך ם ן ף ץ) and nothing here swaps a letter for its final form: where a word ends is your decision. Turn the vowel points off if you are writing modern Hebrew without them.
What comes out
- שלום
- שָׁלוֹם
- ך ם ן ף ץ
Common questions
- Can I type shalom and get שלום?
- No, and that is deliberate. This is a keyboard, not a transliterator: the page never touches the keys you press, so writing Latin letters into the box gives you Latin letters, exactly as you typed them. The promise here is the narrow one this page can keep: the keys you click land in the box, and the keys you press stay yours. To type Hebrew, click the keys on the board. The small Latin letter printed on each keycap is where that letter sits on the standard Israeli layout, the layout Windows, macOS and Linux all ship: t is alef, a is shin, h is yod, v is he, e is qof. If you learn those positions and switch your machine to Hebrew in its keyboard settings, you can type without this page at all, which is a better outcome than a transliteration guess.
- How do the final letters work?
- Five letters change shape at the end of a word: kaf becomes ך, mem becomes ם, nun becomes ן, pe becomes ף and tsadi becomes ץ. In Unicode these are not shapes but separate characters with their own codepoints, so each one gets its own key here, on the Israeli layout position it belongs to (ך on l, ם on o, ן on i, ף on the semicolon, ץ on the full stop). Nothing on this page swaps a letter for its final form as you type, because where a word ends is your decision and an automatic swap gets it wrong on an abbreviation or a single letter quoted on its own.
- How do I add vowel points, and do they survive a copy?
- Leave Vowel points on Show and the niqqud rows appear under the letters: sheva, the three reduced vowels, hiriq, tsere, segol, patah, qamats, holam, qubuts, the dagesh and the shin and sin dots. Type the letter first, then click the point, and it attaches to the letter before the caret. They are real combining marks, each its own codepoint sitting after its letter, which is why the readout counts a letter carrying two marks as one letter and two points. Because they are part of the text rather than a picture of it, they copy and download with everything else. What the page cannot control is the font at the other end: a font with no Hebrew point coverage may draw them clumsily or not at all, and the characters are still there.
- Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
- Nothing is uploaded. The layout is part of the page and the typing happens in your browser, so there is no server to send it to and no account to make, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with no connection. Your draft and your vowel-point choice 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. Download writes the box out as a plain UTF-8 text file with no formatting and no byte-order mark added.
- Why does Hebrew sometimes paste in looking backwards?
- Because some pages copy the drawn shapes rather than the letters. Hebrew is stored in logical order, meaning the order you typed it, and every text field, document and message app lays it out right to left on its own using the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. This page inserts characters in that order and adds nothing invisible to steer the display, so a copy from here is ordinary Hebrew text. A page that instead reverses the characters, or fills them with direction marks and presentation forms, looks correct where it came from and then refuses to match a search or a spell check anywhere else.
- What are the ׳ and ״ keys for?
- They are the geresh and the gershayim, the Hebrew marks that the Latin apostrophe and quotation mark are usually typed in place of. A geresh marks an abbreviation and also writes the foreign sounds Hebrew has no letter for, as in ג׳ for the j in job. A gershayim sits before the last letter of an acronym, as in תנ״ך. The maqaf beside them, ־, is the Hebrew hyphen, drawn along the top of the line rather than in the middle of it. All three are the proper Hebrew characters here, not their Latin lookalikes.
Standard Unicode Hebrew in the Israeli layout, stored in logical order, so what you copy pastes correctly anywhere that reads Unicode. Vowel points are real combining marks attached to the letter before them. This is a keyboard and not a transliterator: typing Latin letters gives you Latin letters.