The Thai language does not use spaces between the words in a sentence. This poses unique challenges for the beginning student whose first language does utilize word spacing, but with practice, reading Thai becomes second nature.

If you reflect on how you read English, for example, you might be surprised to learn that we recognize words as a whole, rather than by parsing the individual letters from which they are composed. Doing the latter would make reading very much slower! Rest assured that the same will hold for Thai. Like a first-grader, we begin by following each individual letter, but when you can read at a more advanced grade school level, you will be recognizing entire words, and you won't even notice that there are no spaces between the words.

Because Thai is "designed" to be written without spaces between the words, it will be easier to read Thai than it is to read this:

That is because Thai has rules such as the following:

These rules go a long way, and will be helpful until you start forming word boundaries by recognising words. Having said all this, Thai does use spaces in some cases. See Bryan's article for more information on Spacing in the Thai Language.

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This article by Glenn Slayden based on material by Richard Wordingham
May 19, 2007