Arabic superscript alif

It marks a long ā where a full alif is not written. Also called small alif, it is read after its host letter. In هَٰذَا, the mark over ه supplies the long vowel in hādhā (“this”); it is not a second consonant.

The sign developed as a way to show omitted alifs. The examined Qur’an manuscripts from the first two Islamic centuries lack dagger-alif signs; by the eleventh century, Qur’anic traditions describe vertical strokes for omitted alifs.

Why is the alif above the letter?

It preserves the spelling while adding a reading cue.

Qur’anic rasm—the inherited spelling of the text—can leave out a pronounced long vowel. Dagger alif acts as a miniature alif above the line. Fatha marks a short vowel, madda belongs to a full alif, and alif wasla is an initial letter form; they do different jobs. A twentieth-century Cairo Qur’an edition used dagger alifs to help readers distinguish words with the same rasm, including al-kitāb and al-kutub.

In modern Arabic, the mark appears in a handful of conventional words and is rare even in fully vocalized prose, where a fatha is often used instead. Qur’anic pages retain it as explicit recitation guidance.

How do I type dagger alif?

Place it after the Arabic letter it belongs to. Enter it with Unicode input or a character picker; it is a combining mark, not a spacing alif.

A 2018 Windows 10 user report found no dedicated key on Arabic 101/102 layouts. A character picker or custom keyboard layout can provide the mark.

When fatha or shadda shares the letter, an Arabic-aware font shapes the marks as a stack. If the mark floats or collides, try the same text in another Arabic font before changing the character sequence.