sa3a
an hour, hour, clock, watch, time, timepeaceThe word, broken down.
ساعة reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A plain 's'. Three small teeth in a row.
A long 'a' vowel. A single upright stroke, and the first letter of the alphabet.
A voiced sound from deep in the throat. Arabizi writes it '3'.
The 'tied tāʾ'. It marks a feminine ending, sounded as a soft 'a'.
What does sa3a mean in Arabizi?
sa3a is how you write ساعة in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “an hour, hour, clock, watch, time, timepeace”.
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 — 4 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 time 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 →- 01S→س
- 02H→ا
- 03U→ع
- 04M→ة
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “clock” is saa3a (سَاعَة). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear saa3a on Tfaddalu →