zarqa'
blueThe word, broken down.
زَرْقاء reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A plain 'z'. Like rāʾ, with one dot above.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
A rolled 'r', closer to Spanish than English.
A deep 'k', made far back in the throat.
A long 'a' vowel. A single upright stroke, and the first letter of the alphabet.
A glottal stop, the catch in the middle of 'uh-oh'.
What does zarqa' mean in Arabizi?
zarqa' is how you write زَرْقاء in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “blue”. No numbers in this one; it spells out in plain Latin letters.
New to the chat alphabet? See how every letter and number maps: 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 — 7 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 clothes 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.→ز
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03V→ر
- 04Shift+X→ـْ
- 05R→ق
- 06H→ا
- 07X→ء
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “blue” is 'azraq (أَزْرَق). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear 'azraq on Tfaddalu →