alan
nowThe word, broken down.
الْآن reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
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.
A long 'aa': an alif with a wave on top that stretches the vowel.
A plain 'n'. A deep bowl with one dot above.
What does alan mean in Arabizi?
alan is how you write الْآن in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “now”. 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.
It sits in the jobs & work 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 →- 01H→ا
- 02G→ل
- 03Shift+X→ـْ
- 04Shift+N→آ
- 05K→ن
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “now” is al-'aan (الآن). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear al-'aan on Tfaddalu →