Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To represent (letters or words) in the corresponding characters of another alphabet.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To express or write, as words of a language having peculiar alphabetic characters, in the alphabetic characters of another language; spell (the same, or approximately the same, sound) in different characters.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To express or represent in the characters of another alphabet.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb rewrite in a different script

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[trans– + Latin littera, lītera, letter + –ate.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word transliterate.

Examples

  • Actually not for how to transliterate from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.

    Think Progress 2009

  • Already, Brazilians—aficionados of Global English almost as much as of soccer or futebol—are compelled to transliterate “pickup” as picape and “knockout” as nocaute, and not just to get rid of the ks that look strange to them, but also to nail the foreign vowel sounds.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Already, Brazilians—aficionados of Global English almost as much as of soccer or futebol—are compelled to transliterate “pickup” as picape and “knockout” as nocaute, and not just to get rid of the ks that look strange to them, but also to nail the foreign vowel sounds.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Sure, the origination of Hanukkah -- or however you choose to transliterate it -- predates that of Christmas.

    Danny Licht: Jews for Christmas, or How to Make the Holidays Less Blue Danny Licht 2011

  • Sure, the origination of Hanukkah -- or however you choose to transliterate it -- predates that of Christmas.

    Danny Licht: Jews for Christmas, or How to Make the Holidays Less Blue Danny Licht 2011

  • The spelling difficulties only happen when you try to transliterate the word into the Latin alphabet that we use to write English.

    Paul Golin: Finally, The Right Way To Spell The December Jewish Holiday Paul Golin 2011

  • Banks allow clients to transliterate their names as they see fit when they open new accounts.

    Arabic Names Spell Trouble for Banks Deborah Ball 2011

  • Even better, if I can figure out what each passage or sentence does, I can transliterate that into other emotions.

    Thinking about Horror joshenglish 2008

  • The librarians chose to use three different metadata standards: Dublin Core for HTML searching; MARC for UMW's catalog and the catalogs of the partner libraries in Senegal; and Text Encoding Initiative headers for XML/SGML searching, which will also allow people to search for Arabic texts in Arabic instead of trying to transliterate.

    Creating, Managing & Pres. Dig. Assets: African Online Digital Library 2008

  • The librarians chose to use three different metadata standards: Dublin Core for HTML searching; MARC for UMW's catalog and the catalogs of the partner libraries in Senegal; and Text Encoding Initiative headers for XML/SGML searching, which will also allow people to search for Arabic texts in Arabic instead of trying to transliterate.

    Archive 2008-03-01 2008

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.