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Thai Alphabet

The letters and characters of Thai written in the Thai script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 55,936,800 people read or write it across 1 country.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Thai — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Thai alphabet works

Thai is written from left to right, with no spaces between words and no capital letters. The consonant letters in the chart each carry a built-in vowel — read alone, ก is ka, ข is kha — and a vowel sign replaces that built-in a with another vowel. The vowel signs sit wherever they fit: some after the consonant, some above, some below, and a few before it, even though the vowel is pronounced after the consonant it is written in front of. Two letters in the set, ฃ and ฅ, are obsolete antiques that modern Thai never uses.

Thai is a tone language: every syllable carries one of five tones — mid, low, falling, high, rising — and the tone can change a word's meaning entirely. The spelling fixes the tone by committee. Each consonant belongs to one of three classes — mid, high or low, noted under the consonants in the chart — and the four tone marks (mai ek, mai tho, mai tri, mai chattawa) combine with that class, plus whether the syllable ends in a live or a stopped sound. Nothing on the page says the tone directly; readers compute it from the pieces, which is why the class of each consonant matters.

Final consonants are heavily rationed. A syllable can end in only a few sounds — k, t, p, ng, n, m, and the glides — so many letters lose their identity at the end of a syllable: every s-like and ch-like letter ends as t, b and its kin end as p, and r and l end as n. A silent ห written before a low-class consonant quietly lifts the syllable's tone without making any sound itself, and the sign ์ over a letter cancels it outright.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Thai is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Thai in the Thai script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.