What ड़ means
It is a quick tongue-tip tap made with the tongue curled back.
Curl the tongue back as for ड. That letter briefly blocks the airflow; ड़ makes a quick tap instead. Hindi spelling records that tap inside words such as गाड़ी (car) and at the end of पेड़ (tree). Some English loanwords, such as रोड (road), keep the full stop.
Why is ड़ different from ड?
The dot marks a flap here, not a full stop.
A nukta (़) is a mark below a Devanagari letter that extends the script with an additional written sound. Here it marks the flap in native Hindi vocabulary; elsewhere, nukta can represent sounds found in Persian and Arabic loanwords.
How do I type ड़?
Use the single letter or enter ड followed by the nukta.
Some Hindi keyboard layouts offer ड़ directly. If yours does not, enter ड followed by ़. Unicode defines that sequence as the letter's canonical decomposition, so text can treat the two forms as equivalent.
On phones and computers, the Devanagari font and shaping software (which arranges the letters) control where nukta appears; a missing or misplaced dot can be a display fault (as of 2026-10-09).
Neutral in Hindi writing; the dot marks pronunciation, not politeness or emotion.
Without the dot, ड़ is ड: a flap becomes a full stop.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
1Can ड़ start a standard Hindi word?
No. The flap is not used at the start of standard Hindi words; an initial retroflex stop is written ड.
How to type ड़
ड़\095CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.