khayal
imagination, shadow, fictionThe word, broken down.
خَيال reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
The throaty 'kh', like the 'ch' in Bach or the Scottish 'loch'.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A 'y', or a long 'i' vowel when it carries no vowel of its own.
A long 'a' vowel. A single upright stroke, and the first letter of the alphabet.
A plain 'l'. A tall upright stroke with a curved foot.
What does khayal mean in Arabizi?
khayal is how you write خَيال in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “imagination, shadow, fiction”. 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 →- 01O→خ
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03D→ي
- 04H→ا
- 05G→ل
Feminine and plural forms.
Arabic words change with gender and number. Here’s the full set for khayal:
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.