Odia letter ḍa

A voiced d made with the tongue tip curled back.

This retroflex consonant is commonly transliterated ḍa. Unlike the dental Odia દ, made with the tongue tip near the upper teeth, it uses a curled-back tongue position. A vowel sign changes its built-in vowel; a virama suppresses it, and consonant clusters can form joined letter shapes.

In Odia, ଡ଼ is the between-vowels flap: a quick retroflex tongue tap. It is treated as a positional sound variant of the stop ડ; “between vowels” means after one vowel sound and before another.

Odia’s rounded script has a material history.

Modern Odia writing developed from Brahmi through the Kalinga tradition. The earliest known Odia-language inscription is dated 1051; that is evidence for the language’s written history, not a date for this exact letter outline.

Palm-leaf writing favored curves because straight cuts could split a leaf. The Odia writing tradition also served stone inscriptions, royal charters (official documents), and palm-leaf books on religion, medicine, mathematics, grammar, literature, and history.

Odia belongs to the eastern Brahmic script family. The older Siddhamātrikā script developed into Proto-Bengali, also called Gauḍi; the Odia line continued through Kalinga. These are historical links between scripts, not deductions from similar-looking letters.

How do I type ଡ?

Use a phonetic Odia keyboard or Odia InScript.

Phonetic typing offers the letter as a suggestion after the Latin input Da; choose ડ from the list. If using Windows, check that the Odia InScript layout is active.

An Odia font may shape the sequence ଡ଼ as ଡ଼. That display change does not itself edit the text: the single character ଡ଼ and the sequence ଡ followed by nukta (a dot mark) are different underlying text.