WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Khmer
Khmer gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 41 distinct characters appear across 44 practice words. Khmer is typed on the Khmer NIDA layout.
Holder of the record for the largest alphabet — around 74 characters between the consonants, dependent and independent vowels and diacritics. Consonants stack: a subscript form written beneath the letter above shows a cluster, and a stack can be three deep. Khmer also writes without spaces between words and uses invisible zero-width characters to control where lines may break.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 41 distinct characters across 44 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Khmer keyboard layout
- Khmer NIDA
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 22 of the 41 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ្19
- ន13
- ង10
- ា10
- ម9
- ល9
- ក8
- រ7
- ស7
- េ7
The longest practice word in this script is ទាំងអស់ in Khmer.
The one language written in Khmer
Other writing systems
- Lao Closely related to Thai and simpler, because Lao underwent a spelling reform that Thai did not: words are written broadly as they sound, where Thai keeps etymological spellings from Sanskrit and Pali.
- Malayalam One of the larger Indic character inventories, historically including several hundred ligature forms for consonant clusters.
- Myanmar A rounded abugida written without spaces between words, whose recent history is dominated by an encoding problem rather than a linguistic one.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Khmer and Lao: the largest alphabet, and a simplified one. Khmer holds the record for the largest alphabet and Lao reformed its way to a small one. Two answers to one problem, and what each costs a typist.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.