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Arabic Alphabet

The letters and characters of Arabic written in the Arabic script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 378,792,526 people read or write it across 38 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Arabic — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Arabic alphabet works

Arabic is written from right to left in a cursive script of 28 letters, and almost every letter has up to four shapes — one for standing alone, and one each for the start, middle and end of a word. The chart above shows the alone shapes. Reading works by recognizing the skeleton of each letter through its shapes, and the dots do much of the work: ب, ت and ث are the same body told apart only by where their dots sit. A handful of letters — ا د ذ ر ز و — never join to the letter after them, so words break into joined runs with small gaps.

What the letters write down is the consonants and the long vowels. The three short vowels — a, i, u — are little marks placed above and below the line, and in ordinary books, newspapers and signs they are simply left out: the reader supplies them from knowing the words. The marks survive where guessing is not allowed — in the Quran, in children's books and in texts for learners. A mark doubled at the end of a noun (the tanwin) adds an -n and signals “a” rather than “the”.

The sounds English does not have are the famous part. ع is a squeezed, deep-throated voice with no counterpart anywhere in English, and ح is its breathy partner, a h made far down the throat. Four letters — ص ض ط ظ — are “emphatic”: ordinary s, d, t and th said with the back of the tongue raised, which darkens the vowels around them. ق is a k made so far back it clicks against the uvula, and خ and غ are the raspy pair English speakers meet in Scottish loch and the French r. Against that, the everyday consonants — b, t, d, k, m, n, f, s, sh — are exactly what an English reader hopes they are.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Arabic is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Arabic in the Arabic script.