Amharic Keyboard
Type with English letters and the fidel appears as you go. Write selam and you get ሰላም.
Word suggestions show up here as you type.
How it works
Letters join as you type quickly: s then e makes ሰ. Two letters make one sound: sh ሽ, ch ች, ny ኝ, ts ጽ. Capital E gives the fifth form (sE = ሴ). Tap an example above to insert it.
Typing speedhow long letters keep joining (800 ms)
Guide
Typing Amharic without an Amharic keyboard
How transliteration typing works
Amharic is written in Fidel, a syllabary: each character carries a consonant and its vowel together, so there are over 250 of them. No physical keyboard holds that many keys, which is why almost everyone types Amharic by spelling the sound in Latin letters and letting software pick the character.
Type selam and you get ሰላም. The consonant chooses the row, the vowel that follows chooses which of the seven forms in that row appears.
The seven vowel forms
Every consonant has seven shapes. Learning the pattern for one of them is enough to guess the rest, because the modification is consistent.
| Type | Get | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| he | ሀ | ha |
| hu | ሁ | hoo |
| hi | ሂ | hee |
| ha | ሃ | haa |
| hE | ሄ | hay |
| h | ህ | h, no vowel |
| ho | ሆ | ho |
Sounds Latin letters do not cover
A few Amharic consonants have no English equivalent. The explosive ones are usually typed by doubling or by a nearby letter: tse for ጸ, qe for ቀ, che for ቸ, she for ሸ, gne for ኘ. If a word comes out wrong, it is nearly always one of these.
Where this is useful
Typing on a borrowed computer, filling an Amharic form from abroad, writing a name correctly in a document, or adding Amharic to a design when you do not want to install a keyboard layout. Type it here, copy it, paste it wherever you needed it.
Nothing you type is uploaded. The conversion runs in your browser, so it also works with no connection.