WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Thai
Thai gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 38 distinct characters appear across 51 practice words. Thai is typed on the Kedmanee layout.
Forty-four consonants, around 28 vowel forms and four tone marks, written without spaces between words — spaces mark the ends of clauses instead, which makes working out where one word ends a job for the reader and a well-known hard problem for software. Vowels can sit before, after, above or below the consonant they follow in speech, so visual order and typing order are not the same.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 38 distinct characters across 51 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Thai keyboard layout
- Kedmanee
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 23 of the 38 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.
- ่20
- น19
- ก14
- ี12
- ง11
- ล10
- า10
- เ10
- ้9
- ห9
The longest practice word in this script is หลากหลาย in Thai.
The one language written in Thai
Other writing systems
- Latin The most widely used alphabet in the world, and the one your keyboard is built around.
- Cyrillic Developed in the ninth century and now used across Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia.
- Arabic Written right to left, with letters that change shape depending on whether they start, sit inside, or end a word — and most of them join to the letter after.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Thai: four levels, and no spaces between words. Thai writes without spaces and needs more characters than one keyboard level holds. What that means for a typist, and what a keyboard chart can show.
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.