Thai words for every day: days, months, numbers and greetings

How Thai words are written

• ภาษาไทยThai language Thai
• สวัสดีhello Thai
• ๑๒๓123 in Thai digits Thai

Thai words are written in the Thai script, an abugida descended, according to the Wikipedia article on the script, from Old Khmer by way of the Sukhothai script. Consonants carry the vowel signs above, below, before or after them, and a consonant without a vowel sign is read with an implied short a or o. The script has 44 consonant letters, two of them obsolete, and 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms. The Thai alphabet is set out letter by letter on the alphabets page.

Thai is a tonal language with five tones, middle, low, falling, high and rising, and the script records them. Four tone marks, mai ek ่, mai tho ้, mai tri ๊ and mai chattawa ๋, work together with the class of the consonant, high, middle or low, to fix the tone of a syllable. That is why every word page here gives IPA next to the romanisation: RTGS, the official system of the Royal Society of Thailand, writes no tones.

Lines of Thai run left to right, and words follow one another without spaces; the Wikipedia article on the script notes that spaces appear only in certain cases, such as between phrases. Learned words keep their Sanskrit and Pali spellings, so some letters are written but not spoken, as the silent ทร in จันทร์, Monday, shows.

Dates, numbers and greetings: what to expect in Thai

The days of the week in Thai are วัน, day, plus a Sanskrit planet name, and each day has a traditional colour. The months in Thai are named after the zodiac, and their endings tell their length: -คม for 31 days, -ายน for 30. Years are normally counted in the Buddhist Era, 543 years ahead of the Gregorian count, so 2026 is 2569.

The numbers in Thai are regular once two exceptions are learnt, เอ็ด for a final one and ยี่ for the two in twenty, and Thai has single words for ten thousand and a hundred thousand. The country also has its own digits, ๐ to ๙, used next to 0 to 9.

Greetings rest on one word, สวัสดี, said at any hour and for both hello and goodbye, and closed with ครับ by men and ค่ะ by women. The greetings in Thai page adds thank you, sorry, the forms for seniors and the wai, the gesture that accompanies them.

Where Thai is spoken, and its neighbours

Thai is the sole official language of Thailand; the country page lists Bangkok and the 77 provinces in Thai script next to their romanised names. The Wikipedia article on the language places it in the Southwestern branch of the Tai languages, part of the Kra–Dai family, and calls it partly mutually intelligible with Lao and Isan. Over half of its vocabulary, the same article says, is derived or borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit, Mon and Old Khmer, and Thai is a recognised minority language in Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Myanmar.

That history shows in the comparisons elsewhere on the site. The Asian word list sets Thai words next to Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, each with a transliteration, and many Thai rows sit almost letter for letter beside the Lao ones.