wa7a واحة
Moroccan Darija · noun
“wa7a” (واحة) is a noun in Moroccan Darija meaning oasis.
Meanings
- oasis
Usage
Lwa7a means an oasis, especially those of southern and south-eastern Morocco. The plural is lwa7at. The word comes from Standard Arabic and belongs to a rather formal register: it is heard on the news, in tourism and at school. In everyday speech, people more often say palm grove (nnkhel) or use the name of the place. Important pitfall: online, the spelling "wa5a" or "wakha" almost always corresponds to a different word, wakha ("even if", "OK"), and not to the oasis. The corpus sentences belong to this second word.
Example
مشينا نزورو واحد الواحة ف الجنوب
mchina nzouro wa7ed lwa7a f ljanoub
“We went to visit an oasis in the South.”
How to write it in Latin letters
In Arabizi, Darija written in Latin letters, you will find “wa7a” but also “waha” and “waa7a”. No spelling is official: people write the sounds as they hear them.
Digits stand in for Arabic letters that have no Latin equivalent: 7 is ha (ح), a breathy h from the throat.