Arabic hāʾ, initial form

Type ه; shaping supplies the initial glyph. For initial Arabic heh, enter the base letter ه and let its neighbors determine whether it appears isolated, initial, medial, or final. Use the fixed glyph ﻫ only when a compatibility or exact-display workflow requires it.

Arabic letters join within words, and their outlines change with position. The letter carries the sound and grammatical role; the writing system chooses the connected form.

What does hāʾ do in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu?

It marks /h/, with different roles in each language. Arabic hāʾ is the ordinary /h/ letter and also appears in pronouns and possessive endings. Persian uses it in the plural ending -hā. In Urdu, gol or chhoṭī he ہ writes ordinary h and can affect final vowels; do-chashmī he ھ follows another consonant to mark aspiration, a breathy release.

The Arabic script developed through Nabataean and Syriac traditions and was used for correspondence, documents, Qur'anic copies, and inscriptions. A Zuhayr inscription dated 644–645 is described as the earliest dated Arabic inscription in the cited historical scholarship.

Why does ﻫ look like ه but behave differently?

It is a presentation form, not a second letter. Presentation forms were added mainly for compatibility with older character sets. Modern Arabic text normally stores the base letter, then uses its neighbors to determine the form the font draws. That is why a fixed outline and a context-shaped letter can look alike but serve different encoding purposes.

The Unicode chart maps ﻫ to base hāʾ with an initial-form tag. A font draws the outline, so the same positional form can look different across fonts. Treat ﻫ as a display or compatibility choice.