Kaithi letter Dddha

A flapped retroflex d, made with one brief tongue tap.

Kaithi is an abugida, a consonant-and-vowel script: a consonant normally carries a short unwritten vowel. A vowel sign changes it, and a virama mark cancels it.

Retroflex means the tongue curls back; flapped means it taps briefly against the roof of the mouth rather than closing the airflow.

Why was Kaithi used?

It grew from scribal work and served everyday records.

Kaithi grew out of Kayastha scribal practice. Scribes used it for administrative and legal records, receipts, correspondence, and personal accounts, then for literary and religious manuscripts in Bhojpuri, Magahi, Awadhi, and Maithili settings.

A copper-plate inscription attributed to Chandradeva around 1090 is a possible early example, but its identification as Kaithi is uncertain. Kaithi is documented as an established writing system by the 16th century; it became Bihar’s court script in 1880 and was eclipsed by Devanagari in the early 20th century. Local scribal traditions produced regional styles while the consonant’s role stayed the same.

How can I type 𑂚?

Use a Kaithi input method; a font only changes its appearance.

As of 2026, Keyman lists a Kaithi Inscript layout for Bhojpuri and Maithili, and Noto Sans Kaithi is available as a dedicated font. Kaithi has Bhojpuri, Magahi, and Maithili regional styles; the Unicode 17 reference drawing follows the Magahi style, so a different font drawing need not mean a different letter.

Unicode’s canonical decomposition represents 𑂚 as 𑂙 followed by a nukta mark. Text normalization can treat the single character and that two-character sequence as equivalent.