sa3ba
difficultThe word, broken down.
صَعْبة 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.
The 'tied tāʾ'. It marks a feminine ending, sounded as a soft 'a'.
What does sa3ba mean in Arabizi?
sa3ba is how you write صَعْبة in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “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 — 6 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
- 06M→ة
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “difficult” is qaasi (قاسِي). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear qaasi on Tfaddalu →