What ഡ means
The consonant is voiced. Malayalam consonants carry a short built-in vowel; vowel signs change it, and a virama mark removes it.
Malayalam writing passed through several scripts
About 830 CE, the Vazhappally inscription is the oldest known Malayalam text in Vatteluttu, an older script used for Tamil and Malayalam. Vatteluttu lacked some Sanskrit consonants, so Grantha letters were mixed in; this blend appears in Manipravalam, a medieval Malayalam-Sanskrit style for religious writing. By the 1500s, Grantha-derived Arya-eluttu carried literary Malayalam; sister script Tigalari served mainly for Sanskrit. This dates Malayalam writing, not ഡ’s present form.
Why can Malayalam conjuncts look different?
The same cluster can look different. Traditional and reformed orthographies shape clusters differently; invisible joiner or non-joiner marks can affect one containing ഡ.
Part of the collection
Who writes ഡ
Loading…
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ഡ 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.
More like this
11
How to type or find ഡ
- Search it as
- Malayalam dda · ḍa · retroflex d
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ഡ\0D21Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.