khcheb خشب
Moroccan Darija · noun
“khcheb” (خشب) is a noun in Moroccan Darija meaning wood (material).
Meanings
- wood (material)
- firewood
Usage
Khcheb means wood as a material: furniture, doors, tools, building sites. It is a collective noun that takes the masculine singular. To specify the material, one says "dyal khcheb" (made of wood): "tabla dyal khcheb", a wooden table. For a single piece of wood, a plank or a stick, the unit noun khechba is used. The word is also used for firewood, for the oven or the traditional hammam. It is heard everywhere, in all registers. For an English speaker, the difficulty lies mainly in the initial kh-ch consonant cluster, with no vowel between the two, which Latin spellings render in very different ways.
Example
هاد الباب ديال الخشب
had lbab dyal lkhcheb
“This door is made of wood.”
How to write it in Latin letters
In Arabizi, Darija written in Latin letters, you will find “khcheb” but also “khchab”, “khchb” and “5cheb”. No spelling is official: people write the sounds as they hear them.
Digits stand in for Arabic letters that have no Latin equivalent: 5 is kha (خ), like the ch in Scottish loch.