Arabic Games for Learners: Build, Match and Guess 60 Words

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Arabic Games

These are three free Arabic games you play in the browser: a word builder, where you tap shuffled letters in order and watch the word join up; a memory match of Arabic words and their meanings; and a guess-the-word game with an Arabic letter pad. They use sixty words in six sets, all vowelled and transliterated.

The Ramadan & Eid set covers the words of the fasting month, from سحور (saḥūr, the meal before dawn) to عيد (ʿid, feast). For the start date and fasting times in your city, see our Ramadan 2027 timetable.

How the three games work

The word builder trains how letters join, memory match trains meaning, and guess the word trains spelling. All three draw on the same 60 words, so a word you meet in one game comes back in the other two, and playing all three on one set makes a short revision session.

Word builder

The word builder shows the letters of one word on their own, in the shape each letter takes when it stands alone, and shuffles them. Tap them in the order the word is written, right to left. The line above the tiles joins each letter to the one before it as you go, so ق (qāf) changes shape the moment ط (ṭāʾ) follows it in قطة (qitta, cat). A wrong tap is marked in red and counted. Try another letter. When the word is complete, it appears with its vowel marks and its transliteration.

Arabic letters change shape with their neighbours, which a printed word list cannot show. Six letters, ا د ذ ر ز و (alif, dāl, dhāl, rāʾ, zāy and wāw), never join the letter after them, so when the word reaches one of them a gap opens on the line, as it should. Letters printed in their stand-alone shapes with no joins at all are a common fault in Arabic tattoos, and our page on why unjoined letters are the classic Arabic tattoo mistake shows what that looks like.

Memory match

Twelve cards lie face down: six Arabic words with their vowel marks, and their six meanings. Turn over two at a time. A matching pair stays face up. Two cards that do not match turn back after a moment, or as soon as you pick the next card. The score line counts your turns, so a second try at the same set shows whether the words stuck. Each round draws six of the set's ten words, and two rounds show all ten.

Guess the word

This is hangman without the gallows. You get a meaning and one empty slot per letter, and you guess letters on an on-screen pad: the 28 letters of the alphabet, ة (tāʾ marbūṭa), and the four hamza forms the words use: ء on its own, أ and إ on an alif, and ئ on a yāʾ without dots. You have six lives. After three misses, the transliteration appears as a hint.

The word is spelled without vowel marks, the way Arabic is normally printed. That makes you decide which alif a word starts with: أسد (asad, lion) starts with أ, alif with a hamza, and ابن (ibn, son) starts with a plain ا.

Every word in the games

The games use 60 words, ten in each of six sets, and each word is copied from one of our vocabulary pages with the spelling and transliteration that page prints. The vowelled form is the headword of the word's English Wiktionary entry, for example سحور, the meal before dawn in Ramadan. For the five Ramadan words that none of those pages lists (fasting, the meal before dawn, the meal that breaks the fast, the night prayers and the lantern), the spelling and transliteration come from Wiktionary as well.

Each transliteration is copied from its source page, so a word reads the same here as on its own page, but the sets do not share one convention. The animals and food pages write words without marks (qitta, khubz), the colors and family pages mark long vowels and emphatic letters (aḥmar, khāla), and the numbers page writes ʿayn as an apostrophe ('ashara).

Notes on the word sets

The family set uses والد (wālid) and والدة (wālida), the words for father and mother on official documents, instead of the everyday أب (ab) and أم (umm). Those two have only two letters, and two tiles are not much of a puzzle. The colors are the masculine forms, the ones a dictionary lists first. The numbers are the forms you count with, one to ten.

All six sets are Modern Standard Arabic. Spoken dialects often use other words for the same things, such as the Egyptian عيش (ʿeish) for bread, and each source page lists those differences.

Which game to play first

Play the three games on one set in this order: memory match, then the word builder, then guess the word. That takes you from recognising a word, to seeing how it is built, to spelling it from memory. If you cannot tell the letters apart yet, start with our Arabic alphabet quiz and come back afterwards.

The New round button moves to the next word in the set, and the order is shuffled once per visit, so ten rounds of the word builder play all ten words with no repeats. Words you keep missing are better learned with Arabic flashcards with spaced repetition, which bring a word back just before you would forget it. To see where you stand overall, take the 30-question Arabic level test.

For a class, add a seed number to the address, such as openarabic.org/arabic-games/?seed=12. Everyone who opens that link gets the same rounds in the same order. When the vowelled words start to look familiar, our guide on how to read Arabic, from the first letter to text without vowels is the next step.

Frequently asked questions

Are these Arabic games free?

Yes. All three games are free, with no account and no download. They run in the browser on a phone or a computer, and the games themselves send nothing over the network.

Which Arabic game is best for a beginner?

Memory match is the easiest start, because it only asks you to recognise a word and its meaning. Once you know the letters, the word builder shows how they join, and guess the word asks you to spell a word from memory. All three use the same 60 everyday words.

Can children play these Arabic games?

Yes. The words are everyday vocabulary (animals, colors, food, family, the numbers one to ten), the buttons are large enough for small fingers, and there is no timer. Children who are still learning the letters will find memory match the easiest of the three.

Do I need an Arabic keyboard to play?

No. Every game is played by tapping: letter tiles, cards, and an on-screen pad of Arabic letters. If your computer has an Arabic keyboard layout, you can also type the letters in guess the word.

Why are some letters in an Arabic word not joined?

Six letters, ا د ذ ر ز و (alif, dāl, dhāl, rāʾ, zāy and wāw), never join the letter after them, so many words have gaps. وردي (wardī, pink) has no joins at all: و, ر and د each stop the join, and ي stands alone after د. The word builder shows the gaps as the word grows.

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