sa3b
hard, difficultThe word, broken down.
صَعْب reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
An emphatic 's', pronounced with a fuller, deeper mouth.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A voiced sound from deep in the throat. Arabizi writes it '3'.
A plain 'b'. A tooth-shaped body with one dot below.
What does sa3b mean in Arabizi?
sa3b is how you write صَعْب in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “hard, difficult”.
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 — 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 descriptions 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 →- 01W→ص
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03U→ع
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05F→ب
Palestinians say this one much like the MSA: Sa3b. Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear Sa3b on Tfaddalu →