What ത means
A teeth-position t, without a strong puff of breath. That is what “dental” and “unaspirated” mean here. The spellings ta and tha can identify this same letter; the h does not automatically indicate extra breath. Add a vowel sign to replace its built-in a.
Where did this Malayalam letter come from?
It evolved within older writing traditions, rather than being invented separately. Malayalam writing developed through Vattezhuttu, a script descended from Brahmi and used for Malayalam and Tamil, and forms influenced by another script, Grantha, in Kerala.
The Vazhappally copper plate, an inscribed temple record from approximately 882/83 AD, preserves early Malayalam in Vattezhuttu with some Grantha characters. It records temple administration and ritual obligations. Printing pressures later prompted reforms in the 1970s and 1980s that simplified joins between consonants and vowel signs.
An ordinary letter in Malayalam text, not a mood symbol.
Do not pronounce Romanized “th” automatically as English “th” or as a strongly breathed t.
Part of the collection
Who writes ത
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Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ത 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 ത
- Also called
- Malayalam tha · dental ta
- Search it as
- ta · tha · th
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ത\0D24Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.