Thai Consonants Chart: All 44 Letters and Their Classes

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Thai has 44 consonant letters, and together they make 21 sounds. Every letter belongs to one of three classes: 9 are mid class, 11 are high class and 24 are low class. Two of the 44, ฃ and ฅ, are obsolete. A letter’s class does not change its sound. It helps decide the tone of the syllable. The Thai consonants chart below lists all 44 by class, with each letter’s name, its sound and the word it is named after.

That name is worth learning. Each letter is called by its sound plus a word that uses it, much as you might spell “B for bravo” on the phone. So ก is gaaw gài, “gaaw, as in chicken”. It gives you the sound, and, as you will see below, a clue to the class as well.

The Thai consonant classes at a glance

The three classes are called ไตรยางศ์ (tri yaang). Here is every letter in its class, in alphabet order.

How to read the chart

Name is what you call the letter: the letter, then its word in Thai and what that word means, with the romanization underneath.

Sound has two parts: the sound at the start of a syllable, then the sound at the end. ก is g at the start and k at the end. ร is r at the start and n at the end. A dash means no ending sound is listed for that letter. Thai has only eight ending sounds, so many letters end the same way.

The spelling is the one in our app. An h after a consonant marks a puff of air, so th is close to the t in “top”, never the sound in “thin”, and ph is a breathy p, never an f. Double vowels are long, and the accents show the tone.

Thai consonants chart: all 44 letters

Mid class: 9 letters

High class: 11 letters

Low class: 24 letters

Which two Thai consonants are obsolete?

The two are ฃ (khǎaw khùat) and ฅ (khaaw khon). The Royal Institute dictionary of Thailand says of both that they are no longer used. Modern Thai writes ข and ค instead, so bottle is ขวด (khùat) and person is คน (khon).

They still count among the 44 and keep their places as letters 3 and 5, which is why they appear on every chart. A Royal Society of Thailand journal article notes that both are found in the Ram Khamhaeng inscription and probably once sounded different from ข and ค. Learn to recognise them, then move on. Do not confuse them with ฌ, which is rare but still in use, mainly in words of Sanskrit or Pali origin.

Why 44 letters for 21 sounds?

Twelve sounds are written with more than one letter:

Two things explain most of this. Letters such as ฆ, ฌ, ฏ and ธ turn up mainly in words borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali, so they keep the spelling of those words alive. And letters that share a sound often sit in different classes, which is where they earn their place today.

Why the consonant classes matter for tones

Thai has five tones and four tone marks, but a mark does not name a tone on its own. What it means depends on the class of the consonant it sits on. These three words have the same vowel and the same mark:

The class also sets the tone of a syllable with no mark at all, and you can hear that in the chart. A letter’s name starts with a long, open syllable and no tone mark, so it carries the starting tone of its class. Mid-class and low-class names stay on the mid tone: gaaw, khaaw. High-class names rise: khǎaw. Check the tables: every name in the high-class table, and no other, starts with a rising ǎ. Say the name properly and you can tell at once whether a letter is high class.

This also explains the shared sounds. Low-class letters cannot reach the low or rising tone with the everyday marks, so a high-class partner does it for them. One syllable on all five tones takes two letters: คา (khaa, mid), ข่า (khàa, low), ค่า (khâa, falling), ค้า (kháa, high), ขา (khǎa, rising).

Class is the first of three questions that give you a tone. The other two are how the syllable ends and which mark it carries, and Thai Tones Explained takes you through them. For learning the classes, there is a shortcut: memorise the 9 mid-class letters, then the 11 high-class ones. Whatever is left is low, so 24 letters need no extra work.

How Thai consonants and vowels fit together

Thai consonants carry the syllable, and the vowels are written around them: before, after, above or below, and sometimes on two sides at once. In มา (maa) the vowel follows the consonant. In แม่ (mâe) it is written first, yet you still say the consonant first.

A syllable that begins with a vowel sound still needs a consonant to be written on. That is the job of อ, the last mid-class letter, which is silent there, as in อ่าง (àang, basin), the word in its own name. So once you know the consonants, every written syllable has somewhere to start. Thai is written left to right, with no capital letters and no spaces between words.

Where Sawasdee comes in

In Sawasdee, our Thai app for iPhone, iPad and Android, unit 2, Thai Consonants, teaches all 44 letters, and it is free. So are the rest of the first five units of the 100-unit course: greetings, the vowels, your first words and the five tones. The other units are part of Premium.

In the app the letters are coloured by class, so you start to see the classes before you have memorised them. Each letter has its own page with its class, its start and end sounds, its name word and its stroke order, and you can tap to hear it; the audio is text-to-speech, built into the app. The writing lessons let you trace the letters stroke by stroke. All 44 stay open for free under Script & reference, so you can use them as a chart of your own.

If you want to know how the course is built, read Learning Thai, One Letter at a Time.