Step outside in Ramallah on a January morning and the first thing anyone says to you is about the cold. id-dinya bard. The taxi driver says it, the guy at the bakery says it, your neighbor says it twice. Weather is the easiest small talk going, and Palestinian keeps a tidy set of words for it.
Here are the ones you'll actually use, plus the ready-made lines for saying what it's like out and complaining about it.
Six words and you're covered
| English | Palestinian |
|---|---|
| sun | |
| rain / winter | shita |
| cold (the cold) | bard |
| heat / temperature | 7araara |
| snow / ice | thalj |
| cloud | gheem |
| weather | TaqS |
| sky | sama |
Two of these pull double duty. shita is both "winter" and "rain," so "it's shita out" can mean the season or the actual downpour, and context sorts out which. And 7araara covers "heat," "fever," and "temperature" all at once. The doctor takes your 7araara. So does the weatherman.
One note on TaqS: it's the proper word for "weather" and the one you'll read on a forecast, but in speech people usually lead with id-dinya (the world) and just say what it's doing.
Saying what it's like, with no verb
The line you heard from the taxi driver, id-dinya bard, has no verb in it. id-dinya is "the world," bard is "cold," and that's the whole sentence. The world, cold, done. Palestinian doesn't use a word for "is" in the present, so weather talk comes out about as short as a sentence can get. If that gap feels odd, the no-verb sentence walks through it.
You build the rest the same way, two words side by side:
- id-dinya bard — it's cold out
- ish-shams qawiyye — the sun's strong (so, hot and bright)
- id-dinya naashfe — it's dry out
If the sky's full of gheem, you say fee gheem (there are clouds). And for a single cold thing rather than the weather, reach for the adjective baared: il-mayy baarde (the water's cold), il-ghurfe baarde (the room's cold).
"the sun" and the l that disappears
on its own is "sun." Put "the" in front and the l of il- doesn't survive. It melts into the sh, so "the sun" comes out , never il-shams. Say it slowly and you'll hear the sh doubled. That's the sun-letter rule, and it catches a lot of weather words (ish-shita and ith-thalj, too). The sun letters has the full list.
When it changes: Saar
Weather is mostly about change, and the verb for that is Saar (became, turned into). Drop it in front of a weather word and you get "it's turned...":
- id-dinya Saarat barid — it's turned cold
- Saar fee shita — it's started raining (there's come rain)
- id-dinya Saarat 7araara — it's gotten hot
Saar marks the exact moment things flip. One day it's ish-shams qawiyye, the next morning id-dinya Saarat barid and the whole street is digging out jackets.
Rain, snow, and the mud after
When it's actually coming down, you say id-dinya 3am bitshattet (it's raining). Most of the time, though, people just nod at the sky and say shita.
Snow is thalj, and it's a bigger deal than you'd guess. A few centimeters on the hills around Jerusalem or Hebron and the schools shut. The news leads with it, and half of Ramallah heads out to take photos. Then it ends, and you get the part nobody loves: ith-thalj daab (the snow melted) and the streets turn to wa7el (mud).
A proper winter blow is a (storm). You'll hear it on the forecast and from anyone whose roof is leaking.
Summer, winter, and degrees
Two seasons run the whole conversation. fi-sh-shita (in winter) it's bard and shita; biS-Seef (in summer) it's ish-shams and long dry weeks. The word for summer is Seef, and you can say either fi-sh-shita or bish-shita for "in winter." Both are fine.
For numbers, the temperature is il-7araara again, counted in daraje (degrees): il-7araara 3ashar darajaat means "it's ten degrees." In a Hebron January that's a complaint. In a Jericho August it climbs past forty and nobody argues about the heat.
Grumbling like a local
Nobody is ever happy with it. The all-purpose complaint is shu plus hal- plus the weather: shu hal-bard (what is this cold!) in December, and shu hal-7araara in July. Add kteer (very) when you really mean it: ish-shams qawiyye kteer, the sun's brutal today.
Come summer they'll be wishing for shita. By February they'll be cursing the bard. The weather is never quite right, and saying so out loud is half of every conversation.
