Top Ten Nicknames in Thailand

Today I thought I'd combine a reading lesson with something a bit more informative. The above image contains a list of the top ten nicknames in Thailand. Those with Thai friends should be able to tell whether their parents had some good imaginations or not after reading this!

Let's start with the heading.

๑๐ ชื่อ โหล สุด โดย กระทรวง วัฒนธรรม

Transliterated into English, we get:

10 cheeu loo sut doy gra-suuang wat-tha-na-tham

Here are the meanings of the different words:

ชื่อ (cheeu): name
โหล (loo): dozen
สุด (sut): most
โดย (doy): from
กระทรวง (gra-suuang): ministry
วัฒนธรรม (wat-tha-na-tham): culture

Two important notes here:

• In กระทรวง, the ทร turns into a ซ. This occurs in quite a few Thai words so keep this in mind. If you see this consonant cluster, it is never pronounced as th-r.
• Normally โหล means 'dozen' in Thai. Here though, ชื่อโหล is a metaphor for a name that's often used. In this case, it means wherever you go, you'll meet twelve people with that name. Hence, ชื่อโหล simply means 'common name'. In this case, they're talking about nicknames, so I'll add that to the translated text too.

After all of that, we get the following translated title:

The Ten Most Common Nicknames from the Ministry of Culture

Now, let's have a look at the list. As you can see, they use the word อันดับ frequently. This word simply means 'rank' or 'order'. With that out of the way, here's the list of names for you. Practise reading these Thai words and compare them with the English ones. I've written them in the standard way instead of using my transliteration rules.

10. Beer (เบียร์)
9. Ball (บอล)
8. New (นิว)
7. Fa (ฟ้า)
6. Mai, Nam (มาย, น้ำ)
5. Bank (แบงค์)
4. Ice (ไอซ์)
3. Nan (แนน)
2. Ploy (พลอย)
1. May (เมย์)

Credit for the image has to go to Kru P Mui. Check out her Facebook page too. Although it's in Thai, she's got some really interesting stuff there! If you're curious, her page motto, จุดเปลี่ยนสังคม - ไทย means 'Place of Change for Thai Society'. That's something that we can all get behind!