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Thai language resources

A short, annotated list of the reference works that serious learners and people working with Thai text come back to: dictionaries, grammars, text corpora, courses and the standards behind the script. Official and academic sources are linked; books are named so you can find them in a library or shop.

Dictionaries

  • Royal Institute Dictionary (พจนานุกรมฉบับราชบัณฑิตยสถาน), latest edition B.E. 2554 (2011). The standard monolingual dictionary, the authority on spelling and on the meaning of formal words. The Office of the Royal Society publishes it online, free to search.
  • Mary Haas, Thai-English Student’s Dictionary (Stanford University Press, 1964). Old and still valued: every entry has a careful phonemic transcription with tone and length, and the introduction is a compact description of Thai pronunciation.
  • Domnern Garden and Sathienpong Wannapok, Thai-English Dictionary. A large modern bilingual dictionary with many idioms and examples, widely used by translators.
  • So Sethaputra, New Model Thai-English Dictionary, and its English-Thai companion. Long the standard bilingual dictionaries in Thailand, strong on literary and formal vocabulary.
  • SEAlang Library. An academic project that puts several Thai dictionaries, older academic ones among them, into one searchable interface, with tools for searching by spelling or by sound. Most useful for checking an unusual word against more than one authority.
  • Online dictionaries. Learners widely use thai-language.com (with recordings and tone-marked transcriptions) and Longdo Dict (Thai, English and other languages). Both are free; check unusual entries against a printed dictionary.

Grammars

  • Shoichi Iwasaki and Preeya Ingkaphirom Horie, A Reference Grammar of Thai (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The most thorough grammar in English, built on recordings of real speech. For readers who want to know how Thai works, not only how to use it.
  • David Smyth, Thai: An Essential Grammar (Routledge; second edition 2014). Short, clear and practical, with Thai script throughout. The book most learners keep on the desk.
  • James Higbie and Snea Thinsan, Thai Reference Grammar: The Structure of Spoken Thai (Orchid Press, 2003). Organised by what you want to say, with many example sentences; strong on particles and spoken usage.
  • Kamchai Thonglor, หลักภาษาไทย (Principles of the Thai Language). The classic grammar written for Thai readers, used in schools and teacher training. In Thai, and the source of the traditional terms for classes, syllables and spelling.

Corpora and tools

  • Thai National Corpus, from the Department of Linguistics at Chulalongkorn University. A large balanced collection of written Thai for studying how words are actually used, searchable after registration.
  • NECTEC corpora: ORCHID (part-of-speech tagged text), BEST (the benchmark for Thai word segmentation) and LST20. NECTEC, Thailand’s national electronics and computer technology centre, built them for language technology research.
  • PyThaiNLP, an open-source Python library for Thai: word segmentation, romanisation, spelling, sorting and more. The usual starting point for anyone processing Thai text in code.

Courses

  • Foreign Service Institute, Thai Basic Course (1970s). A drill-heavy course for US diplomats, in the public domain. Dated in places, thorough everywhere.
  • University programmes in Thailand, such as Chulalongkorn University’s Intensive Thai Programme, offer full-time courses for foreigners with a structured syllabus and examinations.
  • Language schools in Bangkok with long histories of teaching Thai to foreigners include the AUA Language Center, known for its listening-first method, and Union Language School.
  • Course books for self-study: Benjawan Poomsan Becker’s Thai for Beginners (Paiboon Publishing), John Moore and Saowalak Rodchue’s Colloquial Thai (Routledge), and David Smyth’s Complete Thai. Choose one that teaches the script and comes with audio.

Standards behind the script

  • The Unicode Thai block, U+0E00 to U+0E7F, with a code chart of every character. Thai is stored in written order, with vowels written before a consonant stored before it.
  • TIS 620, the Thai character set that Unicode’s Thai block follows character for character, and TIS 820-2538, the keyboard layout standard, which NECTEC publishes in Thai. The layouts guide explains it.
  • RTGS, the Royal Institute’s principles for romanisation (1999), and ISO 11940, the transliteration standard; the romanisation guide compares them.

How to use them

A learner rarely needs more than one course, one bilingual dictionary and one grammar to start with; the rest of this list is for when a question outgrows them. Check a surprising entry in a second dictionary before you rely on it, prefer sources that show tone and vowel length, and when a grammar and a native speaker disagree about everyday speech, believe the speaker and note the formal rule as well.

On this site

The alphabet reference gives every consonant with its sounds, class and key; the tone rules fit on one table; the font catalog has every openly licensed Thai font with its licence explained, and the keyboard types Thai on any device.

Questions people ask

What is the standard Thai dictionary?

The Royal Institute Dictionary (พจนานุกรมฉบับราชบัณฑิตยสถาน), now published by the Office of the Royal Society. It sets the standard spelling and is the reference for schools, government and publishers. It is monolingual, so it is most useful once you can read Thai definitions.

Is there a free Thai course?

The US Foreign Service Institute’s Thai Basic Course, written for diplomats in the 1970s, is a work of the US government and in the public domain, and copies of the books and audio circulate freely. Its Thai is dated in places and its transcription takes some getting used to, but its drills are thorough.

Related

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