Devanagari Letter Tta

Use ṭ in IAST, or capital T in ITRANS and Harvard-Kyoto. These are transliteration schemes: systems for representing Devanagari with Latin letters. Select the matching scheme in your conversion tool; these inputs are not universal keyboard shortcuts.

When read in isolation, ट has a built-in vowel: ṭa. A vowel sign changes that vowel. A halant, the vowel-removing sign, suppresses it so ट can join another consonant.

What sound does ट make?

A t with the tongue tip curled slightly back. This is called retroflex. Say it without vibrating your vocal cords or adding a strong puff of air. English t is only an approximation; Hindi commonly uses the retroflex series for English t and d in borrowed words.

Where did ट come from?

It evolved within the Brahmi family of scripts. Brahmi, an ancient Indian writing system, appears in Emperor Ashoka's inscribed proclamations from the third century BCE. Devanagari developed through Gupta-era writing and matured around the thirteenth century CE. These dates describe the script's history, not the first appearance of this exact outline.

Early Devanagari served Sanskrit inscriptions and religious manuscripts, then spread to regional languages. Bengali, Gujarati and Gurmukhi are related writing traditions, but their letters cannot simply replace Devanagari letters.