Animals in Arabic

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Animals in Arabic

The Arabic word for animal is حيوان (hayawan), plural حيوانات (hayawanat). Most animal names take an irregular broken plural rather than an ending: كلب (kalb, dog) becomes كلاب (kilab), and أسد (asad, lion) becomes أسود (usud). The table below gives 50 animals in both forms.

Every other animal list we could find stops at the singular, which is the half you need less. You will say there are dogs in the street long before you talk about one particular dog, and Arabic will not let you build that plural by adding an ending. So the plural gets a column of its own here.

One transliteration scheme runs through the page. ʿ is the letter ع, a squeeze in the throat; ʾ is a glottal stop; kh is the ch of Scottish loch, gh a gargled r. Long vowels are unmarked and the emphatic letters carry no dots, because the script column does that job.

50 animals in Arabic, with their plurals

Farm animals come first, then wild ones, then the sea, the birds and the insects. Read each cell top to bottom: script first, transliteration underneath. A dash in the last column means dialect speakers use the Modern Standard word, pronounced locally. Several of these words have more than one attested plural. The column gives one; the others are not wrong.

How to read the plural column

Two different things are sitting in that column. Confusing them is how learners end up saying the wrong word confidently.

Most of the table is broken plurals. Arabic reshapes the word from the inside instead of adding an ending: the consonants stay where they are and the vowels around them move. Four shapes account for nearly all of these animals. The commonest is fuʿul, which takes short three-letter words: asad to usud, namir to numur, saqr to suqur, qird to qurud, qirsh to qurush. Then fiʿal, as in kalb to kilab and jamal to jimal. Four-consonant words go to faʿalil: thaʿlab to thaʿalib, ʿaqrab to ʿaqarib, qunfudh to qanafidh. The last shape simply ends in -an, and it catches kharuf, ghazal, hut and faʾr, which become khirfan, ghizlan, hitan and fiʾran. Nothing in the singular tells you which shape it will take. Learn both forms as one item.

The second thing is the collective, marked in the table. Eleven of these animals work the other way round: the bare word is the mass noun and the ending ة cuts one out of it. نحل (nahl) is bees in general, and نحلة (nahla) is one bee. Same for ants, fish, chickens, ducks, pigeons, flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, owls and ostriches. That ة is a singulative, not a feminine ending, which is why سمك (samak) is what you order in a restaurant and سمكة (samaka) is what you point at in a tank. To count any of them you also need the Arabic numbers chart, because three to ten flip their gender against the noun they count.

The animals in the Quran and in Arabic proverbs

Seven of the Quran's 114 suras are named after an animal, and six of those seven names are already in the table above. Sura 2 is Al-Baqara, البقرة, The Cow. Sura 6 is Al-Anʿam, الأنعام, The Cattle. Sura 16 is An-Nahl, النحل, The Bees. Sura 27 is An-Naml, النمل, The Ants. Sura 29 is Al-ʿAnkabut, العنكبوت, The Spider. Sura 100 is Al-ʿAdiyat, العاديات, The Charging Horses. Sura 105 is Al-Fil, الفيل, The Elephant.

Three of those titles are the collectives from the last section, which makes sura 27 a free grammar lesson. The chapter is An-Naml, the mass noun, and its verse 18 has قالت نملة (qalat namla), one ant, calling to النمل (an-naml), the rest of them, to get into their homes before Solomon's army arrives. Collective and singulative, in one sentence. Sura 29 supplies the other one worth knowing: verse 41 compares people who take protectors besides God to the spider building itself a house, and calls the spider's house the frailest of houses.

Proverbs are the other place these words turn up. الطيور على أشكالها تقع (at-tuyur ʿala ashkaliha taqaʿ) is birds of a feather, literally birds land with their own kind, and it uses tuyur, the broken plural of taʾir. القرد في عين أمه غزالة (al-qird fi ʿayn ummih ghazala) says the monkey is a gazelle in his mother's eye. اللي ما يعرف الصقر يشويه (illi ma yaʿrif as-saqr yishwih) means whoever cannot recognise a falcon will roast it, which is what people say about someone wasting something valuable.

What changes in the dialects

Very little, as vocabulary goes. Forty-five of the fifty rows above hold across Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian and Levantine, and the differences you hear are pronunciation rather than different words. City speech in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus turns ق into a glottal stop, so qird comes out as ʾird and qirsh as ʾirsh, and the same speakers merge ث and ذ into t and d sounds. That is why ذئب (dhiʾb) is said and written ديب (dib) from Alexandria to Amman.

The five genuine exceptions are flagged in the table: cat, chicken, wolf, mouse and fly. All five come up in a first week of conversation, so learn them in both varieties. Our Levantine Arabic resources page covers the wider Levantine vocabulary split, and reading these words in script rather than transliteration takes about two weeks with the Arabic alphabet chart.

More Arabic word lists

This page belongs to a set of vocabulary charts we keep for looking things up:

• Food in Arabic, with the named dishes and the country each one belongs to
• Weather in Arabic, including the seasonal words that only matter in one region
• Common Arabic phrases, each given in Modern Standard, Levantine and Egyptian
• Our Arabic vocabulary lists, as printable files and ready-made Anki decks

Frequently asked questions

What is the Arabic word for animal?

Hayawan, written حيوان. The plural is hayawanat, حيوانات, and it is a regular plural formed by adding an ending, which makes it one of the easier words on this page. Hayawan is also the word used on signs, in schoolbooks and in the phrase for zoo, hadiqat al-hayawan, the garden of the animals.

Why do Arabic animal plurals look nothing like the singular?

Because most of them are broken plurals: Arabic makes the plural by reshaping the word from the inside rather than adding a suffix. Kalb becomes kilab, asad becomes usud, thaʿlab becomes thaʿalib. The consonants stay in place and the vowels around them change. A handful of patterns cover most animal names, but there is no rule that predicts which pattern a given word takes, so the plural has to be learned with the singular.

How do you say cat in Arabic?

Qitta in Modern Standard Arabic, written قطة, with the plural qitat, قطط. In the Levant people say bisse, بسة, plural bsas. In Egypt it is ʾutta, قطة again in writing but with the qaf pronounced as a glottal stop, plural ʾutat. All three are ordinary everyday words and none of them is wrong.

Which chapters of the Quran are named after animals?

Seven of the 114 suras. Al-Baqara, The Cow, is sura 2. Al-Anʿam, The Cattle, is sura 6. An-Nahl, The Bees, is sura 16. An-Naml, The Ants, is sura 27. Al-ʿAnkabut, The Spider, is sura 29. Al-ʿAdiyat, The Charging Horses, is sura 100. Al-Fil, The Elephant, is sura 105.

Do Arabic dialects use different words for animals?

Mostly they use the same words, pronounced locally. Five common animals are the real exceptions: cat, chicken, wolf, mouse and fly. A Levantine speaker says bisse for cat and jaje for chicken; an Egyptian says ʾutta and farkha. Both say dib for wolf and far for mouse where Modern Standard has dhiʾb and faʾr, and Egyptian says dibbana for fly.

Keep learning Arabic

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• Arabic Alphabet Chart: Every Letter in All Four FormsAn Arabic alphabet chart with all 28 letters in every position: isolated, initial, medial and final, with transliteration, sounds and sun letters marked.
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