What ദ means
Voiced d at the teeth, followed by a short a.
A Malayalam consonant normally carries a short a. A dependent vowel sign changes it; virama, the mark that removes that vowel, lets the consonant join a cluster. A cluster may appear as a joined conjunct. Unicode’s ZWJ (joiner) can request a traditional joined form, while ZWNJ (non-joiner) can keep letters open.
How is ദ different from ഡ?
No. ദ uses the teeth; ഡ uses a tongue curled back.
In Latin transliteration, both may be written as “da”; that spelling alone does not tell you which Malayalam letter was intended.
Where does Malayalam da come from?
It belongs to a script shaped by several writing traditions.
The oldest surviving Malayalam writing appears in Vatteluttu, an older Malayalam script, on the Vāḻapaḷḷi plates dated 882–3 CE. Around the 1500s, literary Malayalam increasingly used Arya, a script tradition derived from Grantha, for Sanskrit loanwords. Vatteluttu forms continued for Dravidian sounds, shared across Malayalam and related languages. Modern Malayalam grew from both lines.
Part of the collection
Who writes ദ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does ദ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
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How to type or find ദ
- Also called
- da
- Search it as
- d · ദ · Malayalam dental da · Malayalam da vs retroflex da · Malayalam virama · Malayalam conjunct
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ദ\0D26Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.