alf
thousandThe word, broken down.
أَلْف reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A glottal stop carried on an alif.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A plain 'l'. A tall upright stroke with a curved foot.
A plain 'f'. One dot above a small loop.
What does alf mean in Arabizi?
alf is how you write أَلْف in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “thousand”. No numbers in this one; it spells out in plain Latin letters.
New to the chat alphabet? See how every letter and number maps: 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 — 5 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 →- 01Shift+H→أ
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03G→ل
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05T→ف
Feminine and plural forms.
Arabic words change with gender and number. Here’s the full set for alf:
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.