Black Sesame Seeds in Urdu: Kaale Til, and the Word People Confuse It With
If you are looking for black sesame seeds in Urdu, the short answer is کالے تل — kaale til. تل (til) is the everyday Urdu word for sesame; کالے (kaale) is simply the colour. That much is uncomplicated. What is not uncomplicated is what happens next. Search in English for “black seed” and you land on کلونجی, kalonji — a different seed, from a different plant, in a different botanical family. Urdu keeps the two apart with two separate words. English collapses them into one phrase, and the mix-up follows people into recipes, spice shops and supplement aisles. This article sets out the Urdu terms, where each came from, and how to tell the two seeds apart with nothing but your eyes.
For our own oil — pressed from the other seed in this story, the kalonji one — see our cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil.
The Short Answer
- Black sesame seeds in Urdu are کالے تل, kaale til. تل (til) is the seed; کالے (kaale) is the colour word. The white kind sold beside it is سفید تل, safed til.
- The plant is Sesamum indicum L., family Pedaliaceae. Kew’s Plants of the World Online treats Sesamum indicum as the accepted name and Sesamum orientale as a synonym of it.
- A second Urdu word, کنجد (kunjad), also means sesame. It is Persian in origin and now survives mostly in the compound روغن کنجد — sesame oil — in Unani and older medical writing rather than in ordinary speech.
- کلونجی (kalonji) is not sesame at all. It is Nigella sativa L., family Ranunculaceae. The two species sit in different botanical orders — Lamiales for sesame, Ranunculales for nigella.
- English is where the confusion is manufactured. Kalonji is sold as black seed, black cumin, onion seed and nigella; black sesame sits a shelf away under a name that sounds like all of them.
- You can separate the two by eye in a few seconds. Sesame is a flat, smooth, faintly glossy teardrop. Kalonji is a hard, matte, angular grain with flat faces and sharp edges.
- Sidr & Stone presses the kalonji seed, not the sesame one: Ethiopian Nigella sativa, cold-pressed below 40°C and independently verified at 2.67% thymoquinone per batch by Analytice, an ISO-accredited French laboratory.
Black Sesame Seeds in Urdu: The Direct Answer
Black sesame seeds in Urdu are کالے تل, transliterated kaale til. تل (til) is the standard Urdu noun for sesame seed, and کالے (kaale) is the plural form of the adjective for black. The plant is Sesamum indicum. The pale kind sold alongside it is سفید تل, safed til, and the two are the same species.
That pairing is not a dictionary invention. Urdu-language reference writing uses both forms in ordinary prose — the Urdu Wikipedia entry for the Pakistani village of واگی lists the local crops as wheat, cotton, sunflower, سفید تل, maize and کالے تل, one after the other. White sesame and black sesame, named as two things a farmer plants, in the language itself.
Here are the words you will actually meet, and what each one denotes.
| Urdu | Transliteration | What it denotes | Plant |
|---|---|---|---|
| تل | til | Sesame seed — the everyday word | Sesamum indicum |
| کالے تل | kaale til | Black sesame seeds | Sesamum indicum |
| سفید تل | safed til | White sesame seeds | Sesamum indicum |
| سمسم | simsim | The plant itself, in reference and Arabic-influenced writing | Sesamum indicum |
| کنجد | kunjad | Sesame, Persian-derived; mainly seen in روغن کنجد, sesame oil | Sesamum indicum |
| کلونجی | kalonji | Not sesame — black seed | Nigella sativa |
Til, Simsim and Kunjad: Three Words, One Plant
Urdu carries more than one word for sesame, and they are not interchangeable in register. تل is the shop word and the kitchen word — the Urdu Wikipedia article on the plant notes that the seeds scattered on top of naan in Pakistan are what get called til. That same article opens by naming the plant سمسم, simsim, the Arabic-derived botanical name. So the plant is often simsim and the thing in your hand is til.
کنجد, kunjad, is the third. It comes into Urdu from Persian, and it has largely retreated into technical and traditional-medicine writing. Searching Urdu Wikipedia for کنجد returns almost nothing in ordinary use — an Iranian place name, and a Unani preparation calling for روغن کنجد, sesame oil. That is a fair picture of where the word now lives. If you meet kunjad, you are probably reading a hakeem’s formulary or an old oil label, not a grocery list.
None of this is a problem, because all three words point at the same plant. The problem is the fourth word.
Kaale Til and Safed Til: What the Colour Word Is Doing
Black and white sesame are the same species. The colour lives in the seed coat, and the pigment responsible for the dark coat is melanin — Dossou and colleagues, writing in Frontiers in Nutrition in 2022 (PMID 35295915), traced the melanin biosynthesis behind black sesame seed coats. It is not anthocyanin, which is the assumption people usually import from berries.
What the colour word is doing in Urdu, then, is exactly what it does in English: distinguishing two seed coats on one plant. It is not marking a different crop, a different grade, or a different quality tier. For what the colour does and does not change nutritionally, we have written that up separately in our guide to black sesame seeds and what is actually in them, which carries the published composition figures.
Kalonji Is Not Til: Two Words, Two Plants, Two Orders
This is the part worth slowing down for. کلونجی and تل are not two words for one seed, or two grades of one seed, or a regional variation. They are two unrelated plants, and Urdu has never confused them. English did that.
Kew’s Plants of the World Online places Sesamum indicum in Pedaliaceae, order Lamiales — the same broad group as mint, olive and basil. It places Nigella sativa in Ranunculaceae, order Ranunculales, alongside buttercups and delphiniums. These are not neighbouring families. They diverge at the level of the order, which is about as far apart as two flowering plants on a spice shelf can reasonably get.
| کالے تل (kaale til) | کلونجی (kalonji) | |
|---|---|---|
| Accepted species (Kew POWO) | Sesamum indicum L. | Nigella sativa L. |
| Family | Pedaliaceae | Ranunculaceae |
| Order | Lamiales | Ranunculales |
| Shape | Flat teardrop, smooth, slightly glossy | Angular grain, matte, flat faces and sharp edges |
| Feel between finger and thumb | Slick, leaves a faint oiliness | Hard and dry, no slip |
| Taste | Nutty and mild; sweeter toasted | Sharp and bitter, faintly like oregano |
| English names in circulation | Black sesame | Black seed, black cumin, kalonji, onion seed, nigella |
Look at the last row. Our own seed carries five English names, and two of them belong to other plants entirely: “black cumin” is used across Central and South Asia for Elwendia persica, and “onion seed” belongs, on any plain reading, to Allium cepa. We have written about both mix-ups — the kalonji-versus-kala-zeera problem in black cumin seed in Urdu, and the onion misnomer in onion seed oil. Urdu, for what it is worth, handles all of this better than English does. It gives each seed its own word and leaves it there.
Buying Kaale Til When the Label Is in English
The practical difficulty is not translating kaale til. It is that the packet in front of you is often labelled in English, by an importer, using a name that does not map cleanly back onto the Urdu. This is the translation table that actually matters at the shelf.
| English on the packet | What is usually inside | Urdu |
|---|---|---|
| Black sesame seeds | Sesamum indicum, dark seed coat | کالے تل |
| Sesame seeds / white sesame | Sesamum indicum, pale seed coat | سفید تل |
| Black seed / nigella / kalonji | Nigella sativa | کلونجی |
| Onion seed | Nigella sativa — nothing to do with onions | کلونجی |
| Black cumin | Ambiguous. Usually Nigella sativa in UK retail; Elwendia persica in much of Central and South Asia | کلونجی or کالا زیرہ |
The one line on a packet that settles the question is the botanical name. If it says Sesamum indicum, it is til. If it says Nigella sativa, it is kalonji. If it says neither, tip a few seeds into your palm: flat and slippery is sesame, hard and angular is kalonji. For what else is worth checking before you buy, see our notes on buying black sesame seeds.
Three Objections Worth Taking Seriously
“Everyone knows what they mean. Is this not pedantry?” It would be, if the two seeds behaved alike. They do not. They taste different, they cook differently, and they are bought for different reasons — sesame for its oil and its nuttiness, kalonji for its sharpness. Substituting one for the other in a recipe does not produce a near-miss; it produces a different dish. And once money is involved, the name stops being cosmetic: a bottle sold as “black seed oil” and a bottle sold as “black sesame oil” contain oils from plants two orders apart.
“My family has always used one word loosely. Are you telling me we were wrong?” No. Household usage is its own authority, and regional usage varies genuinely — that is precisely why a single English gloss cannot be trusted. What this article says is narrower: when you need to be certain, the botanical name is the only thing that resolves it, because it is the only label that is standardised. Everything else, in every language, drifts.
“You sell black seed oil. Why should I trust you on sesame?” A fair challenge, and the honest answer is that we do not sell sesame in any form and have nothing to gain from what you conclude about it. What we do have is a working interest in the naming problem, because it is our problem too. We evaluated 36 suppliers before settling on Ethiopian highland seed, and the first thing that has to be settled with any supplier is which species is actually in the sack — because, as this article has shown, the English name does not settle it.
Why Sidr & Stone
The argument running through this article is that a name is not a specification. That is the same argument we make about our own product, and it is why we publish a measured figure rather than an adjective.
- Independently verified 2.67% thymoquinone, tested per batch
- Tested by Analytice, an ISO-accredited French laboratory, with a Certificate of Analysis
- Organically grown Ethiopian highland Nigella sativa — chosen after a 36-supplier evaluation
- Cold-pressed below 40°C to protect the heat-sensitive thymoquinone
- 100% pure — a single ingredient, nothing added
- Unrefined, which preserves the oil’s natural integrity
- Bottled in matte black UV-protective glass
- Halal certified
- 10% of profits to charity
- Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US
We will not tell you Sidr & Stone is the strongest or the purest black seed oil — that would be exactly the kind of unverifiable claim this article warns against. What we will say is that our thymoquinone figure is 2.67%, independently verified per batch, and that the species on our label is Nigella sativa and nothing else. If you want the full checklist we would apply to anyone’s bottle, including ours, it is in our guide to choosing a quality black seed oil.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are black sesame seeds called in Urdu?
Black sesame seeds in Urdu are کالے تل, kaale til. تل (til) is the word for sesame seed and کالے (kaale) means black. The white kind is سفید تل, safed til.
Is til the same as kalonji?
No. Til is sesame, Sesamum indicum, in the family Pedaliaceae. Kalonji is Nigella sativa, in the family Ranunculaceae. Kew places them in different botanical orders. They are unrelated plants that English happens to describe with overlapping words.
How do you write black sesame seeds in Urdu script?
کالے تل, written and read right to left, with کالے first and تل second. Some writers add a kasra to تِل to fix the vowel and distinguish it in print.
What is the difference between kaale til and safed til?
The seed coat, and nothing more fundamental. Both are Sesamum indicum. The dark coat gets its colour from melanin rather than anthocyanin, according to work published in Frontiers in Nutrition in 2022.
Is kunjad an Urdu word for sesame?
Yes, though not the everyday one. کنجد comes from Persian and now appears mostly in Unani and older medical writing, particularly in the compound روغن کنجد — sesame oil. In a shop you would ask for til.
Why do English packets call kalonji “black cumin” and “onion seed”?
Historical loose translation, mostly. Neither is accurate: “black cumin” is widely used across Central and South Asia for a different plant, Elwendia persica, and kalonji has no botanical relationship to onions at all. The names stuck because nobody corrected them.
Where can I buy black sesame seeds in the UK?
South Asian, Middle Eastern and East Asian grocers stock them routinely, as do wholefood shops and the larger supermarkets. Sidr & Stone does not sell sesame seeds. Our notes on what to check before buying black sesame seeds cover the questions worth asking of any supplier.
Is black seed oil a medicine?
No. Black seed oil is a food supplement, not a medicine. It has a long traditional history and an interesting body of research around thymoquinone, and can be a worthwhile part of a healthy routine — but it does not cure diseases and is not a substitute for medical care. Be cautious of any black seed oil marketed with specific disease-cure claims.
Final Thoughts
The Urdu answer is short and it is stable: black sesame seeds are کالے تل. What makes the question worth asking at all is the second seed standing just behind it — کلونجی, a different plant with its own word in Urdu and five competing words in English. The language you ask the question in changes how easy it is to get a straight answer.
There is a wider lesson in that for anyone buying seeds or oils. A common name is a description of habit, not a specification. It varies by region, by household, by importer and by decade. A botanical name does not, and a laboratory figure does not. When a purchase turns on what is actually in the bag, those are the two things worth reading.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to. Our cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil — pure Nigella sativa, independently verified at 2.67% thymoquinone — is available now, with fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
Shop Sidr & Stone Cold-Pressed Ethiopian Black Seed Oil — Verified 2.67% Thymoquinone →
Disclaimer: This article describes Urdu and English naming practice for two seeds at the time of writing; usage varies by region, household and importer, and readers should check the botanical name on a packet where it matters. Black seed oil is a food supplement, not a medicine, and is not a substitute for medical treatment of any condition. For any health concern, consult a qualified medical professional.