Weather in Arabic

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Weather in Arabic

Weather in Arabic is الطقس (al-taqs) in Modern Standard and الجو (il-jaww) in every spoken dialect. Hot is حار (harr), cold is بارد (barid), rain is مطر (matar). The Levant adds شوب (shob) for heat and شتي (shiti) for rain, which Egypt and the Gulf do not use.

Weather words in Modern Standard, Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf Arabic

Most weather nouns are shared. Rain, snow, cloud, thunder and fog are the Modern Standard words in all three dialects, and the chart says so in the cell instead of inventing a variant to fill it. The words that do split are the ones people say every day: the general word for weather, hot, cold, and whether the sky is nice. One transliteration scheme runs through the page: kh is the ch of Scottish loch, gh is a gargled r, ʿ is the letter ع, and ʾ is a glottal stop. No dots under the emphatic letters, because the script column is there for that.

How to ask and answer about the weather

Asking about the weather is where the four columns pull furthest apart, because the question word itself differs: Modern Standard uses kayfa, Levantine kif, Gulf shlon, and Egyptian puts its question word at the end of the sentence and asks what the weather is doing. The replies below are what people say, not translations of the English sentence. Where a Gulf form is not separately attested, the cell says the Modern Standard wording is used rather than guessing at one.

Why weather vocabulary splits by region

Weather vocabulary is regional because the weather is regional. The shared nouns describe any sky, but each part of the Arab world has a name for the thing it actually gets every year, and those names do not travel.

Gulf Arabic has no special word for heat. It says الجو حار (il-jaww harr) like everyone else. What it has instead is the شمال (shamal), which is just the ordinary word for north: a northwesterly dust wind over Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, blowing at up to 70 km/h, with a single event carrying dust for three to five days. In June and July it is close to continuous. A learner reading a Gulf forecast meets this word before almost any other, and our Gulf Arabic learning resources cover the dialect it sits in.

Egypt and the southern Levant name a season of dust instead. The خمسين (khamsin) takes its name from the Arabic for fifty, after the roughly fifty-day window it blows in; Egyptian Arabic calls it خماسين (khamasin). It usually arrives in April, though it can come any time from March to May, and it is violent: gusts to 140 km/h, temperature rises of up to 20 °C in two hours, humidity below 5%. In the southern Levant it blows in autumn as well as spring. English borrowed the Mediterranean name for the same system, the sirocco.

The Levant does have its own heat word. شوب (shob) is a noun for the heat of the weather, with a verb شوّب (shawwab), to swelter. It runs across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, and Egyptians and Gulf speakers do not use it. The Levantine Arabic learning resources page covers the rest of that vocabulary split.

Snow is a live word in one place and a dictionary word in another. Lebanon's ski resorts sit between 1,800 and 2,850 metres in the Mount Lebanon range, with a season running December to April, so تلج (talj) is ordinary winter vocabulary in a Lebanese village. In Kuwait City or Abu Dhabi it is a word you read in a newspaper about somewhere else.

How to read the chart, and the mistakes learners make

Read the chart left to right: English, then the Modern Standard script, then its transliteration, then the three dialect columns. A cell reading same word means the dialect uses the Modern Standard word with local pronunciation. Same as MSA means there is no separate colloquial form worth learning.

Three mistakes account for most of the trouble. The first is using الطقس (al-taqs) in conversation. It is correct, it is what a forecast says, and it sounds like a weather bulletin; say الجو (il-jaww) instead. The second is reaching for the adjective when the dialect uses a noun: Egyptian and Levantine both say ig-gaww bard, the weather is cold, using برد rather than بارد. The third is برد itself, which is bard for cold and barad for hail from the same three letters, so unvocalized text leaves the vowels to context.

More Arabic reference tables

This page belongs to a set of charts we keep for looking things up rather than reading through:

• Telling the time in Arabic, including the quarter, half and illa rubʿ constructions a forecast uses
• Animals in Arabic, with the irregular plurals other word lists leave out
• Common Arabic phrases, given in Modern Standard, Levantine and Egyptian side by side
• Our Arabic vocabulary lists, downloadable as plain files or ready-made Anki decks

Frequently asked questions

How do you say weather in Arabic?

Modern Standard Arabic has two words. al-taqs is the weather in the meteorological sense, the one a forecast uses. al-jaww is the atmosphere, and it is the word people actually say in Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf Arabic. If you learn one, learn al-jaww; it is what you will hear in the street.

How do you ask how is the weather in Arabic?

The question word changes by country. Modern Standard Arabic asks kayfa al-taqs al-yawm. Levantine asks kif il-taqs il-yom. The Gulf uses its own question word and asks shlon il-jaww il-yom. Egyptian does not front the question word at all: ig-gaww ʿamil eh in-naharda, literally the weather is doing what today.

What is the Arabic word for hot weather?

harr in Modern Standard, Egyptian and Gulf Arabic. The Levant has a separate word, shob, which means the heat of the weather specifically rather than the temperature of an object. In Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, fi shob is the ordinary way to say it is hot, and an Egyptian would not use it.

What are the four seasons in Arabic?

al-rabiʿ is spring, al-sayf is summer, al-kharif is autumn and al-shitaʾ is winter. The four names are the same everywhere, with local pronunciation. One trap: in Levantine Arabic shiti means both winter and rain, so ʿam tshatti is it is raining, from the same root as the name of the season.

Do all Arab countries use the same weather words?

The nouns mostly, the everyday phrases no, and the named winds not at all. Rain, snow, cloud and storm are the Modern Standard words almost everywhere. But each region names the weather it actually gets: the shamal dust wind in Iraq and the Gulf, the khamsin in Egypt and the southern Levant, and the snow vocabulary that Lebanese mountain towns use every winter and Gulf cities never need.

Keep learning Arabic

• Arabic Vocabulary Lists & Anki DecksFour free Arabic vocabulary lists: Al Kitaab, A New Arabic Grammar, Quran ayat and the 99 Names, each as a printable file and a ready-made Anki deck.
• 99 Names of AllahAll 99 names of Allah in Arabic with full harakat, transliteration, meaning, the root each name is built on, and an everyday word from that same root.
• Al Kitaab Vocabulary Part OneDownload all 364 Al Kitaab Part One vocabulary words in Fusha, Syrian, and Egyptian Arabic as a CSV file or Anki deck, with tips for studying them.
• Jordanian ArabicHow Jordanian Arabic changes across Amman, the north, the south, Aqaba and the Bedouin desert: the qaf, "I want" and "why", compared region by region.