Arabic Date Separator

It separates the day from a month written in words. Urdu uses ؍ after a numeric day; the cited Balochi examples place it at the same boundary. In a right-to-left Pakistani date, the year follows the month.

This is a regional convention. Arabic numeric patterns in CLDR 49, a release of locale-formatting data, use a slash; ؍ marks the boundary before a written month.

Why put ؍ between a number and a month name?

It makes the boundary explicit. That helps when the day is numeric but the month is spelled out; the mark belongs to date punctuation, not general sentence punctuation.

A 1969 Balochi course is the earliest dated print example cited in Unicode’s Arabic-script marks proposal. The proposal also cites Urdu and Balochi books, magazines, dictionaries, lessons, and religious works printed before desktop page-layout software was common.

Urdu date writing also uses ؁ below a numeric year and ؄ for dates in the Śaka era, a traditional calendar year count. Those marks identify a year or era; ؍ marks the day–month boundary.

How do I type ؍?

Navees maps it to Shift + comma. As documented in 2026, this Urdu phonetic keyboard layout assigns Urdu characters by sound; other layouts may use another shortcut.

A 2020 Unicode review records a report of spacing problems between ؍ and Arabic-script digits in some fonts and text-layout software. The review links the issue to the mark’s strong right-to-left direction.