Arabic Letters & Symbols

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, written from right to left: ا alif, ب bāʾ, ت tāʾ, ث thāʾ, ج jīm, ح ḥāʾ, خ khāʾ, د dāl, ذ dhāl, ر rāʾ, ز zāy, س sīn, ش shīn, ص ṣād, ض ḍād, ط ṭāʾ, ظ ẓāʾ, ع ʿayn, غ ghayn, ف fāʾ, ق qāf, ك kāf, ل lām, م mīm, ن nūn, ه hāʾ, و wāw, ي yāʾ. Some charts add hamza ء as a 29th. This is the dictionary order, which groups letters by shape; the older abjad order (أبجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت ثخذ ضظغ) is still used to number lists, the way English uses a, b, c.

Many letters share one skeleton and differ only in their dots: ب ت ث, ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ, ع غ. A dot more or less is a different letter, so copy the exact one you need.

Arabic is always joined up. Each letter takes a different shape at the start, middle or end of a word or standing alone (ب becomes ﺑ ﺒ ﺐ), and six letters, ا د ذ ر ز و, never join to the letter after them. You do not pick the shapes yourself: Unicode stores one code for each letter and the font draws the right form, so the letters on this page are the plain ones you copy into normal text. When lām meets alif the pair is always written as one sign, لا; the ready-made ﻻ ﻷ ﻹ ﻵ characters exist for old systems, but in normal text type ل then ا.

Hamza, tāʾ marbūṭa and alif maqṣūra: the extra Arabic letters

Hamza ء is the glottal stop, the catch in the middle of English uh-oh. It rarely stands alone; it usually sits on a seat: أ at the start of words said with a or u (أنا anā, I), إ under the alif for i (إسلام), ؤ on wāw and ئ on a dotless yāʾ in the middle of words (سؤال suʾāl, question; سائق sāʾiq, driver). آ, alif with madda, is a hamza followed by a long ā, as in آخر (last) and القرآن (the Quran). In casual typing many people drop the hamza and write a bare ا, but in careful writing it belongs there.

ة, tāʾ marbūṭa (the tied tāʾ), appears only at the end of a word and mostly marks feminine nouns: مدرسة madrasa (school), فاطمة Fāṭima. It is said as a plain -a, but becomes -at when another word follows in a possessive phrase: مدرسة البنات madrasat al-banāt, the girls' school.

ى, alif maqṣūra, looks like ي without its dots and is read as a long ā at the end of words: على ʿalā (on), مستشفى mustashfā (hospital), مصطفى Muṣṭafā. In Egypt, final ي is commonly written as ى in print and on signs, so فى is the Egyptian spelling of في (in).

Arabic harakat: the vowel marks َ ُ ِ ْ ّ

Everyday Arabic writes only consonants and long vowels; readers supply the short vowels from the words they know. The harakat (حركات) are the small marks that spell them out: fatḥa َ for a, ḍamma ُ for u and kasra ِ for i. Sukūn ْ says the consonant has no vowel, and shadda ّ doubles it, often together with a vowel: مُدَرِّس mudarris, teacher. Copy a mark right after its letter and it lands on top of or under it.

Tanwīn, the doubled marks ً ٌ ٍ, adds -an, -un or -in to the end of a noun. The one you see daily is fatḥatān on an extra alif: شكراً shukran, thank you, and أهلاً ahlan, welcome. The small upright ٰ, the dagger alif, writes a long ā in a handful of old spellings such as هٰذا hādhā (this) and الرحمٰن ar-Raḥmān.

Full vowelling is used in the Quran, children's books, poetry, dictionaries and wherever a word could be misread: كتب alone can be kataba (he wrote), kutiba (it was written) or kutub (books). The tatweel ـ (kashida) is not a letter but a stretch of the joining line, used to justify lines and in headings (جـمـيـل), and to show a mark on its own: ـَ ـّ.

Arabic punctuation and Arabic numbers 1 to 10

Arabic turns three marks to face its right-to-left direction: the comma ،, the semicolon ؛ and the question mark ؟, which is the ? mirrored. The full stop and the exclamation mark are the same as in English. Quotations go in « » or “ ”, and printed Qurans set verses between the ornate brackets ﴾ ﴿.

Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula usually write numbers with the Arabic-Indic digits ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩, while Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya mostly use 0–9. The digits run left to right even inside right-to-left text, so the year 2026 is ٢٠٢٦. Arabic has its own percent sign ٪, decimal separator ٫ and thousands separator ٬. Persian and Urdu use a second set, ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, whose 4, 5 and 6 look different and have different codes; see the Persian and Urdu collections.

Searches for "Arabic letters in numbers" usually mean the chat alphabet known as Arabizi or Franco-Arabic, which writes Arabic in Latin letters and uses digits for sounds English lacks: 2 for ء, 3 for ع, 5 for خ and 7 for ح, as in 7abibi (حبيبي) and 3arabi (عربي). The older answer is the abjad numerals, in which each letter has a value: ا 1, ب 2, ج 3, د 4, up to غ 1000.

How to type Arabic letters on a keyboard and phone

Windows: open Settings, Time & language, Language & region, and add Arabic; switch layouts with Windows + Space. The standard Arabic (101) layout puts the letters on the letter keys (ض on Q, ش on A, ا on H, ل on G, لا on B) and the marks on Shift: Shift + Q fatḥa, Shift + E ḍamma, Shift + A kasra, Shift + W/R/S the three tanwīn, Shift + X sukūn, and Shift + the key left of 1 for shadda. Shift + H gives أ, Shift + Y إ, Shift + N آ, Shift + J the tatweel, Shift + K the comma ، and Shift + / the question mark ؟.

Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, then add Arabic, or Arabic – PC for the same layout as Windows; the Keyboard Viewer in the menu bar shows where each mark sits. Phones: add an Arabic keyboard in Gboard or in the iPhone's keyboard settings; holding ا offers أ إ آ, and the harakat are on a long-press or on the symbols page, depending on the keyboard.

If pasted Arabic appears as separate letters, the program or font is not shaping it; if it runs the wrong way, the app may not handle right-to-left text. Word processors and browsers handle Arabic, but older design tools need their Middle Eastern text engine switched on (Photoshop and Illustrator call it the World-Ready or Middle Eastern composer). On web pages, mark Arabic passages with lang="ar" dir="rtl" so punctuation lands on the correct side.

Where Arabic is spoken, its currency signs and related languages

CLDR estimates around 380 million Arabic speakers. Arabic is an official language in all 22 member states of the Arab League and in Chad, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Egypt has the most speakers by far, around 105 million in CLDR's estimate, followed by Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan and Iraq with roughly 29 to 37 million each. Each has its own collection of flag, emoji and symbols, among them Egypt 🇪🇬, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, Morocco 🇲🇦 and the United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪.

Arabic speakers write Modern Standard Arabic (al-fuṣḥā) for books, news and official use, and speak regional dialects at home; the Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic and Moroccan Arabic collections cover those. Dialect writers borrow a few letters Standard Arabic lacks: Iraqi and Gulf writers use چ and گ, Algerians and Tunisians ڤ and ڨ for v and g.

Most Arab currencies are written with Arabic abbreviations rather than a symbol: ج.م for the Egyptian pound, د.إ for the UAE dirham, د.ك for the Kuwaiti dinar, د.م. for the Moroccan dirham, ل.ل for the Lebanese pound. The ﷼ U+FDFC RIAL SIGN is the compatibility character for the Iranian rial; Saudi Arabia introduced a new riyal symbol in 2025, which Unicode 17.0 added as U+20C1; font support is still arriving, so it may show as a blank box in some fonts. In English, Egyptian prices are often written E£ or LE.

Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Central Kurdish and Uyghur are written in the Arabic script with letters of their own (پ چ ژ گ and more); see their collections. Hebrew and Aramaic are major Semitic relatives of Arabic (all three are usually grouped as Central Semitic), and Maltese grew out of Arabic but is written in the Latin alphabet.