la3b
to play, playingThe word, broken down.
لَعْب reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A plain 'l'. A tall upright stroke with a curved foot.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A voiced sound from deep in the throat. Arabizi writes it '3'.
A plain 'b'. A tooth-shaped body with one dot below.
What does la3b mean in Arabizi?
la3b is how you write لَعْب in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “to play, playing”.
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 — 5 key presses. Diacritics sit on the Shift keys. The on-screen keyboard on this site highlights each key as you go.
It sits in the hobbies lesson of our Arabic typing practice course, if you would rather drill it next to the words it turns up with.
Practice typing this word →- 01G→ل
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03U→ع
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05F→ب
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “play” is li3eb (لِعِب). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear li3eb on Tfaddalu →