Devanagari Sign Visarga

Select a Sanskrit Devanagari layout, then press H.

Some Sanskrit mnemonic layouts assign ः to H. Select that layout in your keyboard settings first; the shortcut is layout-specific and does not apply to every Devanagari keyboard.

What sound does visarga mark?

It marks a voiceless, breathy release after a vowel.

In Sanskrit, visarga signals that breathy ending, historically where final s or r changed at a syllable’s end. It is a sound cue, not sentence punctuation; the next consonant can alter how it is realized.

Before क or ख, the throat-friction variant is called jihvāmūlīya; before प or फ, the lip-friction variant is called upadhmānīya. These Sanskrit names describe how the breath is shaped.

Why is visarga used?

It marks a final sound shaped by Sanskrit sandhi.

Sandhi is how Sanskrit sounds change where words meet. The earliest surviving written Sanskrit records are inscriptions in Brahmi from the first century BCE. Brahmi later branched into regional scripts; Proto-Nagari emerged toward the end of the sixth century, and Devanagari became important for Sanskrit transcription by the eleventh century.

Anusvara ं marks a nasal sound, while candrabinduँ marks nasalization. Related visarga marks vary across scripts: Kannada commonly gives it a breathy ha sound, Gujarati writing typically leaves it silent, and Tamil uses its visarga character for additional fricative sounds.