WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Odia
Odia gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it. The longest word you will practise here is ବହୁତ, and there is a layout map behind it. Odia is typed on the Odia InScript layout.
Distinguished by the curved line running across the top of most letters — an adaptation, like Sinhala's rounded shapes, usually attributed to writing on palm leaves, where a straight horizontal stroke risked tearing along the grain. Recognised as a classical language of India in 2014 on the strength of a literary tradition more than a thousand years old.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 32 distinct characters across 22 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Odia keyboard layout
- Odia InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 22 of the 32 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.
- ା9
- ବ7
- ହ4
- ି4
- ଏ3
- ନ3
- ପ3
- ମ3
- କ2
- ଟ2
The longest practice word in this script is ବହୁତ in Odia.
The one language written in Odia
Other writing systems
- Sinhala Written in rounded letterforms with almost no straight lines at all — the usual explanation being palm-leaf manuscripts, whose grain a straight stroke could split.
- Tamil Among the oldest continuously written languages in the world, with inscriptions going back more than two thousand years.
- Telugu A rounded script closely related to Kannada; the two were a single script until roughly the fifteenth century and remain similar enough that readers of one can often puzzle out the other.
There is a written guide for this script: InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts. India's standard keyboard is not one layout but a family. The same key gives the matching letter in Devanagari, Bengali, Telugu and five more.
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.