Ways to say it
| Burmese | Romanization (Wiktionary) | IPA |
|---|---|---|
| မိန်းကလေး | min:ka.le: | /méɪɴɡəlé/ |
| သူငယ်မ | su-ngaima. | /θəŋɛ̀ma̰/ |
| ကောင်မလေး | kaungma.le: | /kàʊɴma̰lé/ |
The terms in this pack are used to refer to a young female person.
What does it mean word for word?
The standard term မိန်းကလေး is composed of မိန်း meaning female and ကလေး meaning child or person.
Which one should you use?
မိန်းကလေး is the standard, neutral term for a girl or a female person. In contrast, ကောင်မလေး is a more colloquial way to refer to a girl or a young lady and it is often used in a casual or affectionate way, such as when referring to a girlfriend. The form သူငယ်မ is also a way to refer to a girl.
Is there a formal and an informal way to say it?
မိန်းကလေး is the neutral option, while ကောင်မလေး is a colloquial term used in informal settings.
How does it change in a sentence?
When you want to say 'one girl', you add the classifier တစ်ယောက် (one person) after the noun မိန်းကလေး to form မိန်းကလေးတစ်ယောက်.
How do you pronounce it?
The romanization is min:ka.le:
Did you know?
- While ကောင်မလေး is a common way to say 'girl', the word ကောင် is also used as a classifier for animals, making the term linguistically interesting.
- The term မိန်းကလေး uses the component မိန်း, which is an ancient root potentially linked to the word for 'wife', though its exact origin remains a mystery to linguists.
- The suffix -လေး in ကောင်မလေး functions similarly to the English diminutive 'little', adding a sense of youth or endearment to the noun.
Examples in context
- သူက ကောင်မလေး တစ်ယောက်ပါ။She's a girl.This sentence is useful for saying 'She's a girl' using the form ကောင်မလေး.Tatoeba #4457459 by sithu015, translation #1807853 by AlanF_US
- ကျနော် အဲ့ဒီ မိန်းကလေးကို တွေ့တယ်။I saw the girl.This sentence is useful for saying 'I saw the girl' using the form မိန်းကလေး.Tatoeba #5049453 by Khamlan, translation #3858718 by Evie
- အဲ့ဒီ မိန်းကလေးက ချစ်ဖို့ကောင်းတယ်။ae de mein ka lay ka chit pho kaung tal.That girl is cute.
- 1 more sentence on Tatoeba
Example conversation
Two friends are talking about a girl they saw at the park.
- စုစု Su Suဟိုမှာ မိန်းကလေး တစ်ယောက် မြင်လား။ho hmar mein ka lay ta youk myin lar?Did you see a girl over there?
- အောင်အောင် Aung Aungအင်း၊ မြင်တယ်။inn, myin tal.Yes, I saw her.
- စုစု Su Suသူက အရမ်း လှတာပဲ။thu ka ayan hla tar pal.She is very beautiful.
- အောင်အောင် Aung Aungဟုတ်တယ်၊ တကယ် လှတယ်။hote tal, ta gae hla tal.True, she really is beautiful.
Sources
- Wiktionary, “girl” translations and entries မိန်းကလေး, သူငယ်မ, ကောင်မလေး, CC BY-SA 4.0, dump of 2026-09-26.
- Word origins: Wiktionary entries ကောင်မလေး, မိန်းကလေး, သူငယ်မ, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Example sentences: Tatoeba CC BY 2.0 FR.
