About
A working reference for English speakers learning Arabic.
EnglishToArabic.org is mostly a static reference site, with a small translator on the homepage for quick lookups. It is not a course, not a flashcard app, and not a chatbot dressed up as one of those things. The site exists because the open web has, for the last decade, accumulated enormous amounts of low-quality Arabic-language content for English speakers — listicles that conflate dialects, phrasebooks that flatten register, etymology pages that copy from each other without sources, and AI-generated material that nobody read before publishing. There is good Arabic-learning material out there too: textbooks, dictionaries, the work of individual teachers and academic linguists. This site tries to be a useful thing in between — fuller than a single phrasebook page, narrower and more honest than a general-purpose encyclopedia.
The audience is English speakers learning Arabic, at any level. The pages assume you read English fluently and Arabic incompletely or not at all. We use Arabic script, a Latin transliteration, and an English meaning together, every time, so that early learners can lean on the transliteration and more advanced readers can ignore it. Where a phrase or grammar point varies between Modern Standard Arabic and the major spoken dialects, we say which is which. Where a claim — about etymology, about historical use, about how a word lands in a particular country — is contested or uncertain, we say so rather than pick the cleaner-sounding answer.
The site is small. It is edited by hand by humans who read and speak Arabic, with help from contributors and reviewers in the Arabic-speaking world. We use AI tools to draft and to check ourselves — like most editors and most writers do, in 2026 — but no page goes live without a human editor having read it through and signed off. The longer version of that policy is on the editorial principles page.
Three operational notes. First: we don't run trackers, analytics scripts, pop-ups, or pixel-counting third-party widgets. The site is plain HTML and a single stylesheet. Second: we don't run advertising beyond what is declared in our ads.txt, and we don't run affiliate links — if a textbook is recommended, no one is paid for it. Third: corrections are welcome and read carefully. The contact page explains how to reach us. The contributors page lists the people who have helped, as the project grows.
If you find the site useful, the most valuable thing you can do is tell us when something is wrong. Native speakers, especially of less-documented dialects, are the readers we most want to hear from.