Persian (Farsi) Letters

The Persian alphabet has 32 letters, written from right to left. In order, with their Persian names and the sound each one writes: ا alef (ā), ب be (b), پ pe (p), ت te (t), ث se (s), ج jim (j), چ che (ch), ح he (h), خ khe (kh), د dāl (d), ذ zāl (z), ر re (r), ز ze (z), ژ zhe (zh), س sin (s), ش shin (sh), ص sād (s), ض zād (z), ط tā (t), ظ zā (z), ع eyn (a glottal catch, often silent), غ gheyn (gh), ف fe (f), ق qāf (gh in Iran, q in Afghanistan), ک kāf (k), گ gāf (g), ل lām (l), م mim (m), ن nun (n), و vāv (v, u or o), ه he (h, or a final -e) and ی ye (y or i). Some charts count hamza ء as a 33rd sign; it is mostly found in Arabic loanwords.

Persian is joined up like Arabic: each letter changes shape at the start, middle or end of a word, and the font picks the shape for you, so you only ever copy the plain letters on this page. Seven letters never join to the letter after them: ا د ذ ر ز ژ و. Persian has no capital letters, so there is no upper and lower case to choose from.

Persian keeps the Arabic spelling of thousands of Arabic loanwords, which is why several letters write the same sound in Persian: ث س ص are all s, ذ ز ض ظ are all z, ت ط are both t and ح ه both h. In Iranian Persian غ and ق also sound alike. Pupils learn which letter a word takes by heart, the way English spellers learn night and knight.

Persian's own letters: پ چ ژ گ, and the Persian ی and ک

Persian took the Arabic alphabet and added four letters for sounds Arabic lacks, each made by adding dots or a stroke to an Arabic shape: پ pe (p) from ب, as in پدر pedar, father; چ che (ch) from ج, as in چای chāy, tea; ژ zhe (the s in English pleasure) from ز, as in ژاله zhāle, dew, and مژه mozhe, eyelash; and گ gāf (g) from ک, as in گل gol, flower. These are the answer to "Persian letters not in Arabic", and Urdu, Pashto, Kurdish and other languages written in the Arabic script inherited them from Persian.

Two everyday letters look like Arabic ones but are different characters. Persian ی (U+06CC) has no dots when it stands alone or ends a word, where Arabic ي (U+064A) keeps two dots below; Persian ک (U+06A9) has no small mark inside it, unlike Arabic ك (U+0643). In the middle of a word they look the same, which is why text typed on an Arabic keyboard can pass for Persian on screen yet fail in search, sorting and spell-checking. If you write Persian, copy ی and ک from this page or use a Persian keyboard layout.

The hamza forms come almost only from Arabic: آ (alef with madda) writes a long ā at the start of a word, as in آب āb, water; أ, ؤ and ئ mark hamza in Arabic-derived spellings such as تأثیر ta'sir (influence), مؤسسه mo'assese (institute) and مسئول mas'ul (responsible); a bare ء may occur in Arabic-style spellings such as اجزاء ajzā (parts), but final hamza after a vowel is usually not pronounced in modern Persian. ة survives in a few fixed Arabic expressions such as دائرةالمعارف (encyclopedia); most loanwords write it as ه or ت instead.

Persian vowel marks: zebar, zir, pish, tashdid and tanvin

Persian has six vowels. The long ones are written with letters (ā with ا, u with و, i with ی); the short a, e and o usually are not written at all, and readers know them from the word. When they are needed, the marks are zebar َ (a), zir ِ (e) and pish ُ (o). Sokun ْ shows that a consonant has no vowel and tashdid ّ doubles it. Children's books, poetry, dictionaries and words that could be misread use them: کرم alone can be kerm (worm), karam (generosity) or kerem (cream).

Tanvin ً (-an) appears mainly in Arabic adverbs that Persian uses every day: حتماً hatman (definitely), تقریباً taqriban (almost), فوراً foran (at once). The other two tanvin marks ٌ ٍ occur in a few fixed Arabic phrases only.

The ezāfe, the -e that links a noun to the word describing it, is mostly left unwritten, or shown as a zir: کتابِ من ketāb-e man, my book. After a word ending in a silent ه, standard Persian spelling writes the ezafe as ه followed by the combining hamza mark ٔ: خانهٔ من khāne-ye man, my house; precomposed ۀ is not recommended.

Persian numbers 1 to 10, punctuation and the half-space

Persian writes numbers with its own digits: ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, read sefr, yek, do, se, chahār, panj, shesh, haft, hasht, noh, and ۱۰ dah. They have their own Unicode codes, separate from the Arabic ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩, and ۴ ۵ ۶ are drawn differently from Arabic ٤ ٥ ٦. Numbers run left to right even inside Persian text, so the Iranian year 1405 is ۱۴۰۵. Persian uses ٫ as the decimal point (۳٫۱۴), ٬ to group thousands and ٪ for percent.

Persian turns three marks to face its writing direction: the comma ،, the semicolon ؛ and the question mark ؟. Quotations go in guillemets, «سلام»; the full stop and the exclamation mark are the usual . and !. The keshide ـ is not a letter but a stretch of the joining line, used in headings and calligraphic layouts.

The most Persian character of all is invisible: the half-space (نیم‌فاصله nim-fāsele), the zero-width non-joiner U+200C. It stops two letters from joining without putting a full space between them, and correct Persian needs it all the time: می‌روم miravam, I go; کتاب‌ها ketābhā, books. A plain space splits the word in two and lets a line break land in the middle of it; no space glues the parts into one wrong shape. On web pages the HTML entity ‌ writes it.

How to type Persian on a keyboard and phone

Windows: open Settings, Time & language, Language & region, add Persian (فارسی) and pick the Persian (Standard) keyboard; switch with Windows + Space. The top letter row from Q types ض ص ث ق ف غ ع ه خ ح and the home row from A types ش س ی ب ل ا ت ن م; the on-screen keyboard shows the rest. On Persian (Standard) the half-space is Shift + Space; on the older Windows Persian layout it is Ctrl + Shift + 2.

Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, then add Persian; macOS offers more than one Persian layout, and the Keyboard Viewer in the menu bar shows where each letter and mark sits. Phones: add the Persian keyboard in Gboard or in the iPhone's keyboard settings; آ, the hamza forms and the vowel marks are usually a long-press or a symbols page away, depending on the keyboard. Both type the Persian ی and ک, not the Arabic ones.

If pasted Persian comes out as separate letters running the wrong way, the program is not shaping right-to-left text. Browsers and word processors handle it; Photoshop 23 and later use the Unified Text Engine to shape Arabic-script text without switching engines; web pages should mark Persian with lang="fa" dir="rtl". Without a Persian keyboard many people chat in Finglish, Persian written in Latin letters: salam, merci, khubi?

Where Persian is spoken: Farsi, Dari and Tajik

In Iran, Persian is called fārsi (فارسی), which is the source of the English name Farsi; the Afghan and Tajik standards are called Dari and Tajik. CLDR estimates around 89 million speakers: about 66 million in Iran, where it is the official language, and about 20 million in Afghanistan, where it is officially called Dari and shares official status with Pashto; smaller communities live in Pakistan (around 1.7 million), Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Canada and Oman. In Tajikistan the language is Tajik, written in Cyrillic since 1940 (in Latin letters from 1928 to 1940); CLDR counts its roughly 10 million speakers separately, in the Tajik collection. The Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan collections gather each country's flag, emoji and symbols.

Iran's currency is the rial, Unicode sign ﷼, though Iranians usually write the word ریال and quote everyday prices in toman (تومان), one toman being ten rials. Afghanistan's afghani has its own sign, ؋, also written افغانی or AFN.

A few emoji belong to Persian writing and its calendar. 🌱 stands for the sabze, the sprouted wheat or lentils on the Nowruz table, and 🍉 for Yalda, the longest night of the year, when families eat watermelon and pomegranate and open the Divān of Hafez for a fāl, a reading of their fortune. 🌹 is the gol of Persian poetry, forever courted by the nightingale; 🫖 is the tea served at every visit. ☫, Unicode's Farsi Symbol, is Iran's national emblem, and the lion and sun, Iran's emblem for centuries and on its flag until 1979, has no emoji of its own, so people write it 🦁☀️.

Many languages of Iran and its neighbours are written in the same script and share پ چ ژ گ: see the Kurdish and Central Kurdish, Baluchi, Gilaki, Mazanderani, Northern Luri and Azerbaijani Arabic Alphabet collections, as well as Pashto and Urdu, and the Arabic collection for the script's 28 original letters.