Arabic letter qaf, final form

Type the base letter; Arabic text handles the shape.

ﻖ is the final shape of the Arabic letter qaf, ق. Arabic text normally stores the base letter and selects its isolated, initial, medial, or final shape from neighboring letters. This presentation form stores the final shape explicitly for compatibility with older data.

For ordinary Arabic words, enter ق. Use the explicit form only when preserving a legacy encoding or testing a particular glyph. If it appears in a word, read it as qaf; the encoding is unusual, not the letter or its pronunciation.

Why does Arabic qaf change shape at the end?

Arabic letters join, so their shapes change with position.

Qaf’s history belongs to the Arabic letter and its changing written forms, not to this compatibility character. Cursive Nabataean documents from the first-century CE provide evidence for Arabic script ancestry; fully developed Arabic letter repertoires appear in inscriptions from the late fifth-century CE. Early Arabic writing varied, and scribes added dots to distinguish letters whose older shapes had converged.

Qaf’s pronunciation also varies by region. A 2017 analysis of Lebanese written discourse found that choosing [q] or a glottal variant could signal formal, regional, or religious identity; the association was not universal. The encoded final form itself carries no fixed social meaning.