Step by step
How to use the tamil keyboard
- 1The keyboard above is already set to Tamil; you can switch language from the list if you need another.
- 2Click the keys on screen, or just type — your own keyboard is remapped to the layout shown.
- 3Use Shift for the second layer, which carries the rest of the characters.
- 4Copy the text when you are done, or download it as a .txt file.
Why type Tamil in a browser
Adding Tamil to an operating system is a settings-menu expedition that ends in a keyboard you cannot see: the letters are not printed on your keys, so you are typing blind in a script you may have no muscle memory for, and you have changed a system-wide setting to write one line.
The usual workaround is worse — hunting characters in a character-map utility and pasting them one at a time, or copying words out of search results and hoping the spelling survived the trip.
A visible keyboard solves the specific problem of writing Tamil occasionally: spelling a name correctly for a form, a certificate or a record, writing a message or a greeting to someone who reads Tamil, or adding a Tamil line to a document, a caption or a design. Every key is on screen, the arrangement is the standard one, and when you are finished there is nothing to undo.
Eighteen consonants, and a third of the board empty
Tamil's keyboard looks broken the first time you see it, and it is not. Tamil has no aspirated consonants — no equivalent of ख, घ, छ or झ — so every position the standard layout reserves for them is genuinely empty. Where other Indian scripts have four stops at each place of articulation, Tamil has one.
What is there is complete: all eighteen Tamil consonants, all twelve vowels, and the five Grantha letters ஜ ஷ ஸ ஹ க்ஷ that Tamil uses for Sanskrit and loanwords. Nothing Tamil spelling needs is missing.
The pulli ் — the dot that strips a consonant's inherent vowel — is on the D position, the same place the halant sits on every other Indian layout. It is what writes தமிழ் and every other word that ends on a bare consonant, and it is the most-used key on the Tamil board.
InScript is not what most Tamil typists use
This board is InScript, and the honest position is that Tamil Nadu largely did not adopt it. The layout most Tamil typists learn is Tamil99, designed around Tamil's own phonology rather than projected from Devanagari, and it puts the vowels and consonants where Tamil's frequencies want them. Phonetic and transliteration input is also very common.
InScript still works, and correctly: every Tamil letter is reachable and the output is the same Unicode. But if you already type Tamil99, the positions here will feel wrong, because they are a different standard rather than a variation on yours.
For the job this page is usually opened for — a name, an address, a line of text — the on-screen keys are the answer either way. Every letter is visible and labelled, so you can find it by reading rather than by knowing where it should be. A Tamil99 layout is a reasonable thing to want here and is not built yet.
Bamini, TSCII and the many encodings of Tamil
Tamil has an unusually tangled encoding history. Before Unicode settled the question there was TSCII, TAB, TAM and a crowd of font-specific schemes — Bamini most famously — each storing Tamil as something other than Tamil. Text from any of them displays correctly only under its own font or converter.
The result is that old Tamil documents, and a surprising amount of Tamil still circulating, are not interchangeable with each other. A file that opens perfectly on one machine is unreadable on the next, and there is no single fix because there was never a single encoding.
Unicode ended that, and Unicode Tamil is what this board produces. It is what phones render, what search engines index, and what a form will accept — and it is the only version of Tamil text that works without knowing where it came from.
Your own keyboard, remapped
Clicking keys is fine for a name and tedious for a paragraph, so the keyboard already in front of you is remapped while you type. Press the key where a Tamil letter sits on the picture and that letter is what appears, with the small grey label on each key telling you which of yours produces it.
The mapping follows the physical position of the key rather than the letter printed on it, so it lands correctly even if you already run AZERTY or Dvorak underneath. Space, Enter, Backspace and the arrow keys are left alone, and Ctrl and Cmd shortcuts pass straight through, so copy and paste keep working.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The layout is a few kilobytes of data in the page and every keystroke is handled in your browser — no request, no account, no history. That matters more than it sounds, because what people type in a script they cannot otherwise type is usually a name, an address or a message.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
Why are so many keys blank on the Tamil keyboard?
Because Tamil has no aspirated consonants. Those positions are genuinely empty in the script, and every letter Tamil does have is present and reachable.
Is this the Tamil99 layout?
No, it is InScript. Tamil99 is the layout most Tamil typists learn and is a different arrangement; it is not built here yet. Every Tamil letter is still reachable on this board.
How do I type a word ending in a bare consonant, like தமிழ்?
With the pulli ் on the D position, after the consonant. It removes the inherent vowel.
Is what I type sent anywhere?
No. The layout is data in the page and every keystroke is handled in your browser. There is no request to a server, no account and no history.
Do I have to click the keys?
No. Your own keyboard is remapped to the layout shown, matched by physical key position, so it works even on a non-QWERTY system. A checkbox turns it off.