3adu
enemy, foeThe word, broken down.
عَدُوّ reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A voiced sound from deep in the throat. Arabizi writes it '3'.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A plain 'd'. A small hook with no dots.
A short 'u', written as a small loop above the letter.
A 'w', or a long 'u' vowel when it carries no vowel of its own.
Doubles the letter it sits on; hold the consonant a beat longer.
What does 3adu mean in Arabizi?
3adu is how you write عَدُوّ in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “enemy, foe”.
The 3 stands for ع (ayn): a throaty sound. No clean English equivalent. 3 is a mirrored ع.
For the rest of the chat alphabet, see the Arabizi → Arabic guide. Got it the other way round, with Arabic script to convert? That is the Arabic to Arabizi converter.
The keystrokes, in order.
On a standard Arabic 101 / Arabic-PC layout — 6 key presses. Diacritics sit on the Shift keys. The on-screen keyboard on this site highlights each key as you go.
Want the keys under your fingers first? The mixed session on our Arabic typing practice page runs through words from every set.
Open the typing practice →- 01U→ع
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03]→د
- 04Shift+E→ـُḍamma
- 05,→و
- 06Shift+`→ـّshadda
The definition is adapted from the Wiktionary entry, whose contributors publish it under CC BY-SA 4.0. The frequency rank counts how often the word appears in film and TV subtitles (OpenSubtitles, via Hermit Dave’s FrequencyWords). More on the acknowledgements page.