Arabic Ligatures & Islamic Symbols

﷽ is bismi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, 'In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful', the phrase that opens 113 of the Quran's 114 chapters and most letters, speeches and documents in the Muslim world. Unicode encoded it as one character (U+FDFD) in version 4.0 in 2003, and in most fonts it is the widest single glyph in existence, which is why it sometimes breaks layouts when people paste it into a username.

ﷲ (U+FDF2) is the word Allāh as one character, and ﷻ jalla jalāluhu, 'may His glory be exalted', is the phrase written after it. ﷾ subḥānahu wa-taʿālā, 'glorified and exalted is He', is the one most English-speaking Muslims abbreviate as SWT; ﷿ ʿazza wa-jall means 'mighty and majestic' and ﵎ tabāraka wa-taʿālā 'blessed and exalted'. ﷳ akbar, 'greatest', exists so that الله أكبر can be set with the ligature forms, and ﷴ Muḥammad, ﷶ rasūl 'messenger', ﷵ salām, ﷹ ṣallā, ﷷ ʿalayhi and ﷸ wa-sallam are the building blocks of the Prophet's name and blessing, each as one character.

ﷺ (U+FDFA) is the best known of them all: ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, 'God bless him and grant him peace', written after every mention of the Prophet Muhammad and abbreviated in English as SAW or PBUH. ﵌ adds wa-ālihi, 'and his family', and ﵆ ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-ālih is the form Shia writers prefer. ﵇ ʿalayhi s-salām, 'peace be upon him', follows the other prophets and the angels; ﵍ is the feminine for Maryam, ﵈ the plural, ﵉ the dual for two, and ﵊ the fuller ʿalayhi ṣ-ṣalātu wa-s-salām. ﵁ raḍiya llāhu ʿanhu, 'may God be pleased with him', is for the Prophet's companions, with ﵂ for a woman such as Aisha or Khadija, ﵄ for two, ﵃ and ﵅ for groups of men and of women. ﵀ raḥimahu llāh, 'may God have mercy on him', is written after scholars who have died, ﵏ after several, and ﵋ quddisa sirruh, 'may his secret be sanctified', after Sufi saints. ﷏ salāmuhu ʿalaynā, 'his peace be upon us', was encoded in 2021 from Arabic Christian texts.

These phrases are prayers, not decorations: Muslims write them out of respect, and a non-Muslim writer quoting Islamic texts can use them the same way or leave them out, but should not scatter ﷺ or ﷽ for an 'Arabic look'. The smaller sign versions ؐ ؑ ؒ ؓ from the main Arabic block sit above the name itself, as in printed Quran commentaries, and are on the Arabic Letters & Symbols page together with ۝ end of ayah, ۞ rubʿ al-ḥizb and ۩ place of sajdah.

Lam-alef, two-letter and three-letter Arabic ligatures

A ligature joins letters into one shape. Arabic has exactly one that is compulsory: when ل lam is followed by ا alef the pair is always written as لا, never as a lam with an alef stuck on. ﻻ and ﻼ are that shape as single characters, with ﻷ ﻹ ﻵ for alef carrying hamza or madda. Every other ligature is a matter of style: calligraphers and good Naskh fonts stack م meem under ح hah or tuck ي yeh under ب beh, and the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block (U+FB50 to U+FDFF, in Unicode since version 1.1 in 1993) records 313 such two-letter ligatures as code points, ﰅ beh-jeem, ﰈ beh-meem, ﳍ lam-meem, ﱑ sheen-hah and so on, in isolated, final, initial and medial forms, plus 118 three-letter ligatures such as ﶵ lam-hah-meem and ﷀ meem-jeem-yeh.

The grids above show all of them with the first letter down the side and the second across the top, so ﰅ sits in the row of ب and the column of ج. They exist because early Arabic typesetting systems and Windows code pages stored each visual shape as its own character; Unicode kept them so that old documents could be converted without loss. A modern font makes the same shapes on its own from plain letters, which is why nobody types these in ordinary text and why many of them look identical to the two letters typed normally.

The 28 Arabic letters themselves appear here in their four contextual forms from Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70 to U+FEFC): ﺏ isolated, ﺐ final, ﺑ initial, ﺒ medial. Letters that never connect to the following letter, ا د ذ ر ز و and the ة ى that end words, have only isolated and final forms. The same block gives the vowel marks as visible standalone characters, ﹶ fatha, ﹸ damma, ﹺ kasra, ﹼ shadda and ﹾ sukun, which is how grammar books print a vowel sign on its own without a letter under it.

Letters of Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, Uyghur and the Arabic Extended blocks

The Arabic script writes dozens of languages, and each added letters: Persian پ چ ژ گ, Urdu ٹ ڈ ڑ ں ے ہ, Sindhi's many aspirates ٻ ڀ ٿ ڦ ڄ ڃ ڇ ڍ ڌ ڳ ڱ, Kurdish and Pashto ڤ ڵ, and the Central Asian vowel letters of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz ۇ ۆ ۈ ې. Presentation Forms-A holds their positional shapes too: ﭖ ﭗ ﭘ ﭙ for peh, ﮎ ﮏ ﮐ ﮑ for the keheh used in Persian and Urdu, ﮮ ﮯ for Urdu's yeh barree, and the Uyghur ligatures ﯬ ﯭ ﯮ ﯯ that fuse a hamza-yeh with the vowel after it. They sit here in grids by letter and position; the alphabets themselves, in their own order and with their sounds, are on the Persian (Farsi) Letters, Urdu Alphabet & Letters, Sindhi Alphabet, Pashto Alphabet & Letters, Sorani Kurdish Alphabet and Uyghur Alphabet pages.

The last group is the newest Arabic in Unicode. Arabic Extended-B (U+0870 to U+089F, Unicode 14.0, 2021) adds the alef shapes of medieval and Maghribi Quran manuscripts ࡰ ࡱ ࡲ ࡳ, which record how a particular copyist marked a vowel or a hamza on the alef; variant tatweels ࢃ ࢄ ࢅ, the thin yeh ࢆ and the vertical tail ࢎ; letters for languages such as Bosnian Arebica's ࢉ nj; and reading marks for tajwīd and the Quran's recitation traditions: ࢘ marks the start of a juzʾ, ࢙ ishmām, ࢚ imāla and ࢛ tashīl name ways of pronouncing a vowel, ࢜ madda wājib the obligatory lengthening. Arabic Extended-C on the supplementary plane (U+10EC0 onward, from Unicode 15.0 in 2022) continues with 𐻽 sakta (a brief pause), 𐻾 qaṣr (shortening), 𐻿 madda, the combining alef overlay 𐻼 and three more dotted letters 𐻂 𐻃 𐻄 from Unicode 16.0. Nearly all of these are combining marks, so on this page they show on a dotted circle, and most fonts installed today do not have them yet.

Why presentation forms should not replace normal Arabic text

Every character in the two Presentation Forms blocks is a compatibility character: Unicode's own standard says they are there for round-trip conversion of old data and 'should not be used in running text'. Normalisation (NFKC) turns ﷲ back into الله and ﺑ back into ب. If you write a whole word with these shapes, search will not find it, spell-checkers and screen readers will not recognise it, sorting goes wrong, and the font cannot apply its own shaping, so the joins between letters break. Someone who pastes ﺱﻼﻡ instead of سلام has written something that looks right and behaves like four unrelated symbols.

The honorific ligatures and the symbols at the top of the page are the sensible exception. ﷽, ﷺ, ﷻ, ﷼ and the Unicode 14 honorifics ﵁ ﵇ ﵀ have no plain-letter equivalent of the same size: typing the words out takes a whole line, while the ligature fits in the space of one or two letters, as it does in printed Qurans and classical manuscripts. Unicode itself marks them as the parts of the block that are fine in text. Use them after the names they belong to, and use ordinary letters for everything else.

﷼ (U+FDFC, Unicode 3.2) is the rial sign used for the Iranian rial and often for the Omani, Yemeni and Qatari rial and riyal; the Currency Symbols page lists its neighbours. Saudi Arabia introduced a different riyal symbol of its own in February 2025, encoded separately as U+20C1 in Unicode 17.0 (September 2025), so ﷼ is no longer the right sign for Saudi prices once fonts catch up with the new one.

How to type and copy Arabic ligatures, and what fonts show them

Tap any character above to copy it; the honorifics paste into WhatsApp, Instagram, Word and most apps as plain text. In Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X: FDFA Alt+X gives ﷺ, FDFD Alt+X gives ﷽, FDF2 Alt+X gives ﷲ, FDFB Alt+X gives ﷻ and FDFE Alt+X gives ﷾. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) and search for 'sallallahou' or 'bismillah'; on Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then the code in GTK apps. Phone Arabic keyboards mostly do not carry these characters, so people save them as text replacements or copy them from a page like this.

The characters from 1993, ﷺ ﷻ ﷲ ﻻ and the positional forms, and the 2003 ﷽ are in practically every Arabic font, including the system fonts of Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. The sixteen honorifics ﵀ to ﵏, ﷏, ﷾ and ﷿ arrived in Unicode 14.0 in September 2021 and need a font updated since then: SIL's free Scheherazade New covers the Unicode 14 Arabic repertoire, Google's Noto Naskh Arabic is the safe choice on the web and on Android, and older phones show a box or nothing. Unicode 17.0 (2025) added yet another set of honorifics, ﷲ-related phrases such as jalla wa-ʿalā and karrama llāhu wajhah, which are not on this page because no shipping font shows them yet. If a ligature displays as empty boxes or as separate letters, that is the font, not the text; the character you copied is still correct.