← Back to lessons
Working architectural Hebrew has four distinct registers: the planning office (drawings, scales, tenders), the construction site (concrete, formwork, scaffolding), the conservation desk (tovzah, masor, bitumen), and the planning authority (heter, hachpazah, hitnagdut). This lesson is the deep vocabulary lesson, the one you reach for when reading a tender, drafting a brief, or arguing with a contractor. We also include the units, the materials, the standard drawing conventions.
Cultural note, Hebrew architectural vocabulary is heavily borrowed (German for materials, English for design, Arabic for craft, French for some classical terms). When the foreman on a TLV building site says "tichniyot betoshav", he is mixing Hebrew "drawings" with the Yiddish-influenced "betoshav" pronunciation. Native fluency on a building site is roughly the same difficulty as legal Hebrew, many specialist terms, mostly stable, almost never tested at ulpan.
Drawings & Scales
Materials
Construction Site
Planning Authority
Form & Detail
Reading a Tender Document
A short reading: a typical municipal tender opening for a small civic-building project, sentence by sentence, with translation and what each phrase actually means in practice.