Thai Alphabet Chart: Free Printable PDF With All 44 Letters

Here is a free printable Thai alphabet chart as a two-page PDF: all 44 consonants color-coded by consonant class, the vowels in short/long pairs, the 4 tone marks, and a tone-rules table, each letter with accurate romanization and its memory word. Download the chart (PDF), no email address, no signup, nothing to unlock.

Most alphabet charts you'll find online give you the letters and stop there. That's a shame, because the single most useful thing about Thai letters is invisible on those charts: every consonant belongs to a class, and the class decides the tone of the syllable it starts. Print a chart that hides this, and you'll relearn the alphabet later anyway.

This one shows it. Each letter is colored by its class, and page two includes the tone-rules table that connects the colors to the five tones. Below, you'll find the same chart as a web version where you can hear every letter, plus a short guide to actually using it.

Key takeaways

• The Thai alphabet has 44 consonants, around 32 vowel forms, and 4 tone marks, but only 21 distinct starting sounds, so it's smaller than it looks.
• Every consonant belongs to one of 3 classes (mid, high, low), and the class determines the syllable's tone. A chart that shows classes saves you relearning later.
• Each letter is named after a memory word: ก is kɔɔ kày ("chicken"), ข is khɔ̌ɔ khày ("egg"). Thais learn the alphabet this way, and so should you.
• Two letters (ฃ and ฅ) are obsolete: you need to recognize them, not write them.
• The PDF is free to download, print, and share: two A4 pages, no email gate.

Download the Thai alphabet chart (PDF)

Get the free chart here (PDF, 2 pages, A4). Page one is the full consonant chart, 44 letters in dictionary order, color-coded by class, each with its name, memory word, and meaning. Page two covers the vowels in short/long pairs, the four tone marks, the five tones demonstrated on one syllable, a tone-rules table, and the Thai numerals.

It prints cleanly on A4 or US Letter, in color or grayscale (the class colors stay distinguishable). Stick it next to your desk, or hand it to your students if you teach.

Every romanization on the chart comes from the same engine that powers our free Thai transliteration tool, so the spelling of a word on this chart will match the spelling you see everywhere else on this site, letter for letter. If you've ever bounced between two websites that romanize the same Thai word three different ways, you'll know why this matters.

How to read this chart

Each consonant cell shows four things. Take the first letter:

Thai letter names work like "A as in apple," except the system is official: every letter has one fixed memory word that all Thais learn in school. ก (kɔɔ) is always the chicken letter, ข (khɔ̌ɔ) is always the egg letter: ไข่ (khày). When two letters share a sound, the memory word tells them apart: ศ, ษ, and ส all sound like s, but they're the pavilion (ศาลา (sǎa-laa)), the hermit (ฤๅษี (rɨɨ-sǐi)), and the tiger (เสือ (sɨ̌a)).

The tone marks on the romanization are doing real work, too: mid tone is unmarked, low is à, falling is â, high is á, and rising is ǎ. If those are new to you, our guide to the five Thai tones explains them with audio in about five minutes.

The 44 Thai consonants at a glance

The full consonant chart is below, in traditional dictionary order, the order Thais recite, and the order dictionaries sort by. Only 21 distinct starting sounds hide behind these 44 shapes, because many letters share a sound and differ only in class or origin. Tap any entry to hear it.

The two letters marked (obsolete) exist in the official alphabet and in Unicode, but no modern Thai word uses them. Recognize them, then move on.

Mid class — 9 letters

High class — 11 letters

Low class — 24 letters

If you want the full story of how these letters combine into syllables and words, that's our complete Thai alphabet guide. This page is the chart; that one is the course.

Mid, high, and low class: why the colors matter

The classes — อักษรกลาง (àk-sɔ̌ɔn-klaang) (mid), อักษรสูง (àk-sɔ̌ɔn-sǔung) (high), and อักษรต่ำ (àk-sɔ̌ɔn-tàm) (low) — are not about how a letter sounds. ข (high) and ค (low) both sound like kh. The class is a property each letter carries that, combined with the syllable shape and any tone mark, tells you the tone.

That's why this chart color-codes them. I learned this the expensive way: my own first year of Thai (2019, a teacher whose materials had no tone marks and no structure) left me with a pile of memorized words and no idea why any of them sounded the way they did. Everything tone-related had to be rebuilt from the letters up.

Learn the color with the letter the first time, and the tone rules later feel like connecting dots you already own.

You don't need to memorize the tone rules today. You just need each letter to come with its color attached.

Thai vowels chart

Thai vowels come in short/long pairs — same mouth shape, different duration — and length changes meaning, so the pairs are worth learning as pairs. The chart's second page lays them out. In the table below, the silent letter อ shows where the consonant sits; vowels in Thai can attach before, after, above, or below their consonant.

Four more forms carry a built-in final sound: ไอ and ใอ (both ay), เอา (aw), and อำ (am). Counting every variant, Thai has around 32 vowel forms — but as the table shows, they're built from a much smaller set of sounds plus a length switch.

Tone marks and the five tones

Four tone marks — วรรณยุกต์ (wan-ná-yúk) — can sit above a syllable. Shown here on the silent carrier อ:

Combined with the consonant class, they produce the five tones. The classic demonstration is one syllable, five meanings:

The chart's second page includes this row plus the full tone-rules table — class by syllable type by tone mark. We haven't seen another printable chart that includes it, which is odd, because it's the part you'll consult for months. (For the listening side, the five tones guide lets you hear each one.)

How to practice with the chart

A chart on the wall is a reference, not a method. The chart covers the script; for how it fits into the bigger picture, see our beginner's roadmap to learning Thai. For the letters themselves, here's a routine that works, fifteen minutes a day:

1. Learn names, not just shapes. Recite kɔɔ kày, khɔ̌ɔ khày out loud — the memory word is the handle your brain grabs. Thai kids chant the alphabet this way for a reason.
2. Take five letters a day, not 44 at once. Start with the 9 mid-class letters: it's the smallest class and includes some of the most common letters in the language.
3. Trace, don't just stare. Thai letters are built from loops and lines in a set stroke order; writing a letter five times beats reading it fifty.
4. Hunt your letters in real text. Paste any Thai sentence — a menu, a tweet, a song title — into the transliteration tool and find the letters you've learned inside real words, with the romanization confirming what you're seeing.
5. Let the colors sink in passively. You'll absorb "ส is gold, ช is red" without trying — and when you reach tone rules, that's half the battle pre-won.

This is how I eventually learned the script myself: my teacher took it one or two letters at a time, like short chapters of a book, while we kept speaking practice in romanization. And because no chart like this existed, I built my own reference sheet in Google Sheets — tone rules, one color per consonant class — and kept it open in every lesson. This chart is, more or less, the sheet I wish someone had handed me on day one.

When you're ready to move from letters to actually reading words, the Read track picks up exactly where the chart leaves off, step by step.

Frequently asked questions

Print it, stick it somewhere visible

The Thai alphabet chart works because it's around — on the wall, in the notebook, behind the laptop. Download both pages, print them, and start with five mid-class letters today. When a letter puzzles you in the wild, paste the word into the transliteration tool and the chart's colors will start clicking into place.

No email, no watermark wall, no "premium version." Free tools stay free.