खाना, khaana, food

Spell it "khaana," with a double A

Recommended English spelling is khaana, with two a's. The two a's aren't there for looks. Each one stands for a separate vowel sound, and both are held long.

Break it down: kha + a + n + a

Read "khaana" as four sound-pieces rather than six separate letters:

Each of those two "a"s is a separate vowel sound, held long (like the "a" in "father," not the short "u" in "but"). Spell the word with a single a, as in "khana," and you drop one of those sounds. It's a common shortcut, but it points to the wrong pronunciation. Writing khaana keeps both sounds, which is why this site uses and recommends it.

Devanagari

In Hindi's native Devanagari script, the word is written खाना. Urdu, which uses the Perso-Arabic script instead, writes the same word as کھانا. Same word, same pronunciation, different writing system, because Hindi and Urdu share most of their everyday vocabulary while writing it differently.

Formal transliteration: khānā

Linguists and dictionaries typically transliterate खाना as khānā, using a macron (the line over the a) to mark a long vowel. This is part of IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) and similar systems used in academic writing on Hindi and Urdu.

Common spelling: khaana

Outside of academic writing, most people don't have easy access to a macron, so the long ā gets written by simply doubling the letter: khaana. This is a widely understood convention in informal Romanized Hindi (sometimes called "Hinglish"): a doubled vowel signals "hold this sound longer" the same way the macron does.

Hindi distinguishes between a short a (अ, as in the "u" in "but") and a long ā (आ, held roughly twice as long). Both syllables in खाना carry that long ā, which is exactly what the four-piece breakdown above shows.

Where does khaana come from?

Its roots trace back through Hindi and Urdu to a common Indo-Aryan verb for eating, with a false-friend mix-up along the way worth knowing about.

A shared Indo-Aryan root

Hindi and Urdu both descend from Sanskrit and its later spoken forms (Prakrit, then Apabhramsha), and खाना/کھانا (khaana) is generally traced to the Sanskrit verbal root khād- ("to chew, to eat"), seen in the Sanskrit verb खादति (khādati, "eats"). Over centuries of sound change as spoken Sanskrit evolved into the Prakrits and eventually into Hindi-Urdu, that root produced खाना (khaana), the modern infinitive "to eat," which (as covered in the meaning section) also became the everyday noun for "food."

The Persian false friend: -khana

Here is where it gets confusing, and where a lot of casual internet explanations go wrong. There's a completely different word, Persian خانه (khāna, "house" or "room"), that also gets Romanized as "khana." It shows up as a suffix in many Hindi/Urdu compound words borrowed from Persian: kārkhānā ("workhouse," i.e. factory), dawākhānā ("medicine-house," i.e. pharmacy or clinic), ḍākkhānā ("mail-house," i.e. post office).

This Persian khāna ("house") and the Hindi-Urdu khaana ("food"/"to eat") covered on this site are unrelated words from different language families that happen to sound and Romanize almost identically. Sanskrit and Persian belong to different branches of the broader Indo-European language family, and this pair is a coincidence of sound, not a shared origin. In careful transliteration, the vowel length and stress often differ slightly between the two, but in everyday Roman spelling, the overlap is a genuine, common source of confusion.