The numbers in Arabic texting.
Scroll any Arabic group chat and you'll see words like 7abibi, 3an jad, 5alas. Those digits aren't math. Each one stands in for an Arabic letter that Latin keyboards can't spell — there are only seven, and every one gets a page below.
Seven digits, seven letters.
Read the digit as its letter's sound, not as a number. Each row opens the full explainer, with real words spelled that way and the key that types the letter.
The shapes were already there.
Arabic has sounds the Latin alphabet can't write: the throat sounds, the emphatic letters. When 90s chatrooms and SMS put Arabic speakers on Latin-only keyboards, they reached for digits that looked like the missing letters. Flip a 3 and you see ع. The curve of 7 echoes ح.
Nobody standardized it, and it shows. Plenty of texters write q and s where others use 8 and 9, and many Egyptians and Lebanese write ق as 2 because that's how they pronounce it. But the decoding rule holds everywhere: a “number” sitting inside an otherwise Latin word is a letter.
Decode a word, or learn to skip Arabizi entirely.
Got a specific word to figure out? The converter matches it against our word database. Or learn the real Arabic keyboard — every word on this site shows both spellings while you type.