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One of my favorite things to order from my local Thai restaurant was a dish called “Pra” on the menu. It is a hot and spicy salad I prefer with minced chicken. Once, when I asked for “pra” when calling in my carry-out order, the fellow taking the order couldn’t understand me. He repeated the word back to me sounding, to my ears, exactly the same. But, to him, I was speaking nonsense. I said, “pra” exactly how it was spelled in those Roman letters on the menu page. After a few tries back and forth, we finally had it. “Aaaaahhhh, pra!” he trills, as if we’ve not only found, but unlocked the secrets of the holy grail. And to be honest I kind of felt the same way. Thai menu words are a constant source of miscommunication and confusion.
There is nothing more alienating than to think you are communicating but having the other person find you incomprehensible. See, me, I am not one of those white folks who would have thought this failure was the other gentleman’s fault. I understood that there was some subtle nuance or inflection I was missing. It would be different if Thai food words, or other words, were borrowed words, common in the English language, then I could pronounce it the American way, and he would have no trouble understanding me.
But there are no borrowed words from the Thai language (formerly called Siamese) that I know of. They are all still very much “foreign” to our language. When he finally repeated the correct word back to me, I could hear no difference, but I knew there was a difference. Now, when I order that dish and they understand me even though I butcher the pronunciation, I take it as a gift.
Sometimes, when I try to order a Thai dish without just giving the number, I may as well be saying “blah, blah, blah.” But if I said that to a Thai person, I’d be saying “fish, fish, fish.” Which I guess could work, come to think of it, when ordering dinner.
Thai is a Tonal Language
It turns out that Thai is like other Asian languages. It is a tonal language. It has five tones: low, high, mid, rising, and falling. Depending on how you pronounce the word, it can have a completely different meaning. In other words, if I pronounced pra as if it had a question mark on the end – pra? – with a ‘rising’ tone, it could mean something utterly different.
I don’t know if that is the case with this particular word, but that’s how it goes with tonal languages. To me, I would be asking a question, like, “pra, what is pra?” To a Thai person, this would mean something else altogether.
The Thai Word For Rice
The word for rice in Thai, Khao, is also the word for white, mountain, news, he/she, knee, or even “to enter.” That might also be spelled, to transliterate the sounds, as kào or kâo. The first is a low tone, making the word mean white and the second is a falling tone, making the word mean rice. And it doesn’t even end there. A low tone would mean news, for instance. The word khao, may also be spelled as kao, with or without the funny a, on a Thai menu. You may just as commonly see it spelled kow.
Pad, as in Pad Thai
Here’s another doozy, the word for stir-fry, a fairly important one for a Thai menu, is pad. That might be spelled as phad, pat, phat, pud, put, or phud.
There is no systematized or agreed-upon way to spell Thai words with Roman letters. Many Thai people could probably not make sense of a Thai menu written in this way! By the way, the Thai word for curry is gaeng, or kaeng (pronounced with a g like “gang”).
Gaeng for Curry
But for some reason, there are lots of dishes in my Thai cookbook that use both the word Gaeng and “kari” (the origin of word curry) in their name. Weird. Seems redundant, at first glance. Then I realized that those recipes that used both the word “gaeng” and “kari” were curries that used curry powder along with the Thai curry paste ingredients.
The Thai call curry powder, which they are familiar with but use only in a few Chinese-inspired dishes, phong kari or pong kari (kàrìi).
Gaeng seemed to denote the style of the dish in general, spicy sauced meat and/or vegetables, and kari simply denotes the Anglicized curry spices that gave rise to the word curry, if I’m not mistaken. However, I don’t know how often the word Kari is used in Thai dishes outside its several uses in my cookbook. Apparently, kàrìi is also Thai slang for prostitute, so the author may have been having a bit of fun with his Western readers. A bit more research led me to find that the word kaeng denotes any dish with a lot of liquid, and so it can also refer to soups.
According to Author Joe Cummings, one curry dish, called Kaeng kari kai, is the only time the word kari is used in Thai cuisine, but I am unable to substantiate this. Kaeng kari kai is the curry that most closely resembles a true Indian Curry. However, you and I are probably more familiar with the famous Massaman Curry, kaeng mátsàman, which means literally Muslim curry. 1 This is a southern Thai dish, and, although it more resembles an Indian curry, it is influenced by Thailand’s Islamic Southern neighbor, Malaysia. Personally, Massaman tends to be too sweet for me, at least here in the States, and I prefer the more fiery Thai curries.
Pad Thai Meaning
A list of words does not help your Thai waiter understand you, unless you order Pad Thai, that is, which is never misunderstood. Pad Thai is one of those cases where the name of the dish is simplified. Pad Thai simply means “fried Thai style” or something to that effect. For instance, Kow Pad Thai or Khao Pad Thai is Thai fried rice. It’s just that the Pad Thai we know, with the noodles is so darned famous.
It would be more properly known, however, as Gueyteow Pad Thai or some variation thereof. It is amazing how many people say that Pad Thai literally means “stir fried noodles”, when it is only understood as meaning that, but more literally means stir fried, Thai fried, or Thai stir fried. And by people I mean people who write cookbooks. I can understand the mistake, say, in a blog post, but I would expect a few minutes of research for a book.
So let’s move on to some lingo you can impress your friends and annoy the wait staff with. Remember that all of these words are subject to any number of alternate spellings. So it’s the sounds that are trying to be represented, as there is no one way to spell them with our alphabet. I’ll try to give as many alternate spellings as reasonable.
Common Thai Menu Words
- Ah-hahn: The correct word for food, combined with times of the day to indicate standard meal times, but the word for rice, Kao, or kow, has become the general word for food, being such a fundamental part of Thai cuisine.
- Pet: Spicy (phet), which more accurately reflects something like “pungent”
- Kom: bitter
- Whan: Sweet
- Phat, Phad, Pad: Fried
- Tort, Thawt: Deep fried.
- Op: Baked
- Nerng: Steamed
- Tom: Boiled, used for many soups that are in the category tom yam, or boiled yam.
- Yam: Salad, some sources say it means ‘sour salad’. Short break for a word on salads and soups and the word yam…
- Nam : Water or “sauce.
Thai Soups and Salads
Yam are usually described as hot and tangy salads. The yam section of the menu is my favorite, but it is small as most Thai restauranteurs think we can’t handle them. The guys at my place are still surprised when I order from this section. These yam salads are usually translated on the menu as “Thai style salad” or “hot and sour salad.” I absolutely cannot get enough of them.
You may not have had a Thai hot and sour salad, but you’ve probably had Tom yam which is a type of soup that is hot and sour. Usually spelled tom yum soup on the menus, it’s really a category of soups, rather than one specific soup, but lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, and if you’re lucky, lots of chiles and maybe some chile paste (nam prik). Galangal and coriander may also be in. Don’t eat the galangal..it resembles ginger root and is there for flavor.
Your menu may just say “hot and sour soup” or “hot and sour Thai soup”. Don’t get this mixed up with Chinese hot and sour soup. They are worlds apart and tom yum is much much more spicy and tangy, plus does not use vinegar for the sourness. Examples are Tom Yam Goong, Tom Yam Talay, Tom Yam Sum, Tom Yum Koong, Tom Yum Gai (yam or yum might be used for all). Most likely, if you had one of these soups in Thailand, you would not eat it alone, but with rice, or it would blow your head off.
There are also some “tom” tangy soups with coconut milk, probably the most popular in the U.S. (I love those too). This is called Tom Ka Gai (tom hah gai), which translates literally to boiled galangale chicken but is usually called chicken coconut soup. The coconut soup counters the chiles so if you’ve never tried a Thai yam soup and you aren’t sure about the heat, ask for chicken coconut soup for your first try..they’ll know what you mean.
The other kind of Thai soups are Gaeng jeut or keang jeut. Remember I mentioned above that gaeng, the word for curry can mean any kind of liquid dish, including soups.
Gaeng soups are the opposite of tom yams, being mild broths with soy or fish sauce. There are many types of gaeng soup, which would make sense being it’s a simple broth to which you could add almost anything.
But some common ingredients are mung bean starch noodles (wun sen), tofu (dow hoo), Chinese radish (hoo-a chai tow) and ground pork (moo sap). 2These soups may also have a touch of sour, bitter, or sweet, but are not spicy hot like the yams.
Common Thai Ingredient Words
- Kai: Egg
- Neua Sat: Meat
- Gai: Chicken
- Moo: Pork
- Neua: Beef
- Ah-hahn ta lair: Seafood (ah-bahn talay)
- Plah: Fish (blah), prounced with a “b” sound.
- Nam Pla : Thai fermented fish sauce.
- Gung: Prawn, shrimp
- Plah merk: Squid (bla meuk).
- Boo: Crab
- Bet: Duck
- kow: rice (khao, kao, kaou, etc.) Boiled rice is called kao suay.
- Gueyteow: Noodles (goo-ay dee-o)
- Prik: The Thai word for chile peppers.
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- Prik kee noo or Prik Khee noo suan: The peppers that are often called Thai chiles. Prik knee noo translates, disturbingly, as “mouse-dropping-chiles” but this refers to how they look when dried. A common name for them is “Bird’s Eye Chiles.” (prik ki nu, prik khii nuu).
- Prik kee nu kaset: Serrano type chiles (prik khee noo kaset0.
- Prik kee nu fah: Also called prik chee far, is cayenne chiles (phrik chii faa).
- Prik yuak: A yellow hot and waxy variety.
- Prik num: Long, green New Mexican chiles
- Prik haeng: Dried red chiles (phrik haeng).
- Prik pon: Red chile powder.
- Nam prik: Chile sauce (literally means “chili water”)
- Nam prik pao: Chile tamarind paste.
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- Pak, Phak: Vegetables.
- Ma-ra jeen: Bitter melon.
- Gro-tee am: Garlic
- Hoo-a horm: Onion
- Daan gwah: Cucumber
- Ma-keu a: Eggplant.
- Dork ga-lam: Cauliflower
- Man fa-rang: Potato (not very popular but it’s in a few dishes, like Massaman).
- Fak torng: Pumpkin
- Peu-ak: Taro
- Makeu-a tet: Tomato
- Ma now: Lime
- Ma prow: Coconut
- Ma moo-ang: Mango
- Sap ba-rot: Pineapple
- Bee-a: Beer (yep).
- Wai: Wine.
- Cha: Tea chah yen is iced tea..Thai ice tea rules.
What is Pra?
Here I’ve gone and listed all these words, as best I can anyway, and I realize I’ve left out the word that started me on this fit of research. Pra. My restaurant, under Hot and Sour Dishes, which is separate from Thai Salads, lists a favorite of mine that is simply labeled “pra” with no other words. I figured it was a general word, and perhaps another word for salad, but I wasn’t sure. According to the website for Madam Mam’s Thai Cuisine Restaurant in Austin:
This is a salad found near the coasts in which fresh shrimp have had their shells split down the middle and are very briefly blanched; then they are dressed with lime juice and aromatics. The salad is what the Thais call ‘cured’, meaning that the shrimp is partially ‘cooked’ by the acid in the lime juice, much like a Latino ceviche.3
Except for the lime juice and aromatics, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with the dish I order, which is indeed a salad, like a yam. But, you can choose shrimp, chicken, squid, tofu, or beef. Pra goong seems to refer to a shrimp salad on many menus. The word phra which could easily be mistaken for the same word, turns out to mean ‘venerable one’ or ‘exalted’, used for priests or monks.
I still am not sure what “pra” is, except what I know it as from the restaurant, but I am wondering if the guy taking my order that time thought I was calling him “venerable one” or something! I never did have a gift for languages, except for Latin, but only because they never expected me to speak it.
Say Hello in Thai
Years ago, before I ever had an inkling of this blog post and understood any of the menu words, I took a few moments to memorize one important Thai phrase: Sa Wad Dee.
Pronounce it how it is spelled and you’ll do fine to the delight of the folks at your Thai restaurant. Remember, Thai people are not like the French, they won’t get insulted if you mispronounce a word. They will appreciate the effort.
Besides hello, there is one other very important word, perhaps even more so: Khob Khun. It means thank you. (Additional sources 4 | 5)
MAMA Instant Noodles: Thai Flavored Ramen
- Cummings, Joe. Thailand. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2003
- Burke, Andrew, and Austin Bush. Bangkok. Footscray, Vic.: Lonely Planet, 2010.
- ”Madam Mam Articles.” Madam Mam’s Noodle and More. Web. 21 Mar. 2012. https://www.madammam.com/articles/salad.html
- Lohaunchit, Kasma. Dancing Shrimp: Favorite Thai Recipes for Seafood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
- ”Thai Language.” Know Phucket. Web. 21 Mar. 2012. https://www.knowphuket.com/thai_language.htm.