arabictyper
The word
نَحْو

na7w

side, direction, region
Arabicنَحْو
Arabizina7w
Translationside, direction, region
TypeNoun
Rootن ح و
Audio
MSA audio
Letter by letter

The word, broken down.

نَحْو reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.

01
Letter
ن
nūn
n

A plain 'n'. A deep bowl with one dot above.

Type:K
02
Diacritic
ـَ
fatḥa
a

A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.

Type:Shift+Q
03
Letter
ح
ḥāʾ

A breathy h from deep in the throat, heavier than an English 'h'.

Type:P
04
Letter
و
wāw
w / ū

A 'w', or a long 'u' vowel when it carries no vowel of its own.

Type:,
← First letter shown leftmost; the actual word is read right-to-left in script.
Arabizi

What does na7w mean in Arabizi?

na7w is how you write نَحْو in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “side, direction, region”.

The number in na7w
7ح

The 7 stands for ح (ḥa): a breathy h, deeper than English h. 7 bends the way ح bends.

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.

How to type it

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.

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 →
Sequence
  1. 01Kن
  2. 02Shift+Qـَfatḥa
  3. 03Pح
  4. 04Shift+Xـْ
  5. 05,و
Composedنَحْو
The full set

Feminine and plural forms.

Arabic words change with gender and number. Here’s the full set for na7w:

FormArabicArabiziUse
Singular · currentنَحْوna7wthe base form, for one
Pluralنُحُوّnu7ufor three or more
نَحْو
Practice

Type نَحْو until your fingers know it.

Or take it to the online Arabic keyboard and type it freely. Sessions run inside our free Arabic typing practice tool.

Start a practice sessionOpen the Arabic keyboard

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.