How to say "shirt" in Arabic
New wordMeaningshirt
Arabic · Modern Standard Arabic
qamīṣקמיץ
قميص
Hebrew · Modern Hebrew
khultsaخُولْتْسَا
How the two words are related
No Hebrew relative — learn it fresh.
Qamīṣ — already in the Quran, where Joseph's shirt does the plot work — is an early loan from Latin camisia, the same word behind chemise and camisa. Modern Hebrew went its own way and coined חולצה, so no shortcut here.
Learn it
On the street
How people actually say it in the spoken dialects, where it differs from the standard word.
Levantine · Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria
Urban Levantine turns q into a glottal stop: ʾamīṣ — which happens to sound exactly like Hebrew אמיץ 'brave'.
Egyptian · Cairo and the Nile Delta
Cairo, too, turns the qāf into a glottal stop: ʾamīṣ.
Moroccan · Morocco — Casablanca, Rabat, Fes
Darija's shirt is a qamīja, from Spanish camisa.
In a phrase
a new shirt
Plural
broken plural CuCCān — like بَلَد→بُلْدَان