3ulba
box, chestThe word, broken down.
عُلْبة 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 'u', written as a small loop above the letter.
A plain 'l'. A tall upright stroke with a curved foot.
A plain 'b'. A tooth-shaped body with one dot below.
The 'tied tāʾ'. It marks a feminine ending, sounded as a soft 'a'.
What does 3ulba mean in Arabizi?
3ulba is how you write عُلْبة in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “box, chest”.
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+E→ـُḍamma
- 03G→ل
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05F→ب
- 06M→ة
Feminine and plural forms.
Arabic words change with gender and number. Here’s the full set for 3ulba:
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.