English to Tamil Typing

This surprises people more than anything else about typing Tamil. The script does not distinguish voiced from voiceless stops the way English spelling does. One letter covers both, and pronunciation is decided by where the letter falls in the word.

So if you type ga and get கா, nothing has gone wrong. Tamil simply has no separate letter to give you.

ழ is written zh — thamizh gives தமிழ். It is the letter most often typed wrong by people who reach for l instead.

Tamil has three l letters and three n letters, distinguished by tongue position rather than by anything Roman spelling records. The tool picks from the word it recognises; when the word is not one it knows, it guesses. That is the moment to use the Tamil keyboard, where all six sit visibly next to each other.

Tamil words end in a written pulli rather than a bare consonant — nandri gives நன்றி, vanakkam gives வணக்கம் — and the tool applies that automatically, along with building consonant clusters as you type.

It is a rule-based engine with a small dictionary of common words, not a spell-checker. Greetings and everyday vocabulary come out exactly; longer or rarer words are approximations. Doubling long vowels — aa, ee, oo — corrects most of the difference, and everything stays in your browser either way.