Devanagari letter Rha

A voiced tongue tap, curled back and released with breath.

Curl the tongue slightly back, tap once, and let out a puff of breath. Hindi uses this rha sound in चढ़ना (“to climb”), गाढ़ा (“thick”), and सीढ़ी (“stair”).

The dot matters: ढ़ is the breathy tap, ड़ is the same tap without breath, and ढ is a brief closure released with breath.

Why does Hindi write ढ़ with a dot?

The dot marks Hindi’s evolved tap sound.

The historical trail reaches the Rigveda and Middle Indo-Aryan. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns where retroflex sounds—made with the tongue curled back—are attested; they become more common in Middle Indo-Aryan, a later stage of Indo-Aryan languages. In Hindi, some voiced retroflex stops developed a tap pronunciation.

The dotted form was a later Hindi alphabet addition that records this change in pronunciation.

How do I type ढ़?

Enter ढ plus nukta, or select ढ़ in your input method.

The one-letter form ढ़ is canonically equivalent in Unicode to ढ followed by the nukta dot ़. A phonetic Hindi keyboard may offer it as rha; choose the dotted candidate rather than plain ढ.

If software shows one character in one place and two in another, that is an encoding difference, not a new pronunciation. Text normalization lets software compare both forms consistently.