jaw3ana
hungryThe word, broken down.
جَوْعانة reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A soft 'j' (a hard 'g' in Egyptian Arabic). One dot inside.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A 'w', or a long 'u' vowel when it carries no vowel of its own.
A voiced sound from deep in the throat. Arabizi writes it '3'.
A long 'a' vowel. A single upright stroke, and the first letter of the alphabet.
A plain 'n'. A deep bowl with one dot above.
The 'tied tāʾ'. It marks a feminine ending, sounded as a soft 'a'.
What does jaw3ana mean in Arabizi?
jaw3ana is how you write جَوْعانة in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “hungry”.
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 — 8 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 greetings & introductions 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 →- 01[→ج
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03,→و
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05U→ع
- 06H→ا
- 07K→ن
- 08M→ة