Gurmukhi letter da

It marks Punjabi’s dental d, made at the upper teeth.

Punjabi alphabet charts give its name in Latin transliteration as da; schoolbooks also use dadda. In a word, a built-in vowel or a vowel sign supplies the syllable: ਦਿਲ is the Punjabi word for “heart,” with ਿ marking short i after ਦ.

Where did Gurmukhi letter da come from?

Its story follows the development of Gurmukhi writing.

Surviving early Sikh manuscripts—handwritten texts from the Sikh tradition—date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the written tradition may reach back to Guru Nanak’s lifetime.

Gurmukhi grew from regional Landa writing, a family of practical scripts used for trade and administration, within the older Sharada/Brahmi script tradition. It was shaped in the sixteenth century to record Guru Nanak’s teachings, then served Sikh sacred writing and everyday Punjabi. A 2008 account describes Punjabi written in Gurmukhi in Indian Punjab and in Shahmukhi, a separate Perso-Arabic-based script, in Pakistani Punjab.

How do I type and read it correctly?

Choose a Punjabi layout; the key depends on its input method.

Microsoft’s Punjabi IME offers Phonetic input, which turns Latin-letter spellings into Gurmukhi suggestions, and InScript, which assigns characters to fixed keys. In ਦਿ, the short-i sign displays to the left but follows ਦ in reading; some editors move the shaped syllable as one cursor unit.

In ਦ੍ਵ, the virama—a mark that suppresses the built-in vowel—lets ਦ join directly to ਵ; the mark has no separate sound. This sequence appears in Sanskrit-influenced Gurmukhi spelling.