What ﴿ means
It opens an ornate Arabic quotation frame. Its closing counterpart is ﴾. In Arabic printing and typography, this decorative pair is often called Qur'anic brackets or ornate parentheses (al-aqwas al-muzakhrafa), widely used by editorial convention to enclose quoted verses from the Qur'an and distinguish sacred citations from surrounding commentary.
Early Qur'anic manuscripts used varied markers such as strokes, dots, circles, or rosettes to separate verses. The ornate parentheses serve a different purpose: they do not mark the boundary of an ayah inside the continuous text of the Qur'an itself, but frame an excerpt cited within an external book, article, or essay.
Beyond religious quotations, some publications use the pair as decorative quotation marks or formal brackets depending on editorial style. In every context, it functions as typographic punctuation rather than an expression of personal feeling.
Read it as punctuation, not a reaction.
If someone sends ﴿ by itself, treat it as an unmatched piece of punctuation. It carries no independent emotional tone, slang greeting, or emoji reaction; its meaning comes from framing quoted words together with its partner mark.
In mixed Arabic and Latin text, ﴿ can appear confusing because it does not mirror automatically like standard ASCII parentheses ( and ). In the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, these ornate brackets keep a fixed shape, so mixed-direction layouts can display them in unexpected positions.
When citing in right-to-left Arabic text, use both marks to form a proper quotation frame: open the excerpt with ﴿ and close it with ﴾.
Formal and traditional: strongly associated with scriptural quotation and Arabic typography.
Sending it alone leaves punctuation unmatched; use it paired with ﴾.
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsOpens a scriptural quotation following traditional Arabic editorial convention.
Don't confuse it with
3
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
3Is ﴿ an emoji?
No. It is a typographic punctuation mark in the Arabic script with no emoji pictograph design or reaction meaning.
Does ﴿ mark the end of an ayah in the Qur'an?
No. It opens an external quotation of an ayah in regular text. Numbered verses in the Qur'an are conventionally marked with the separate end-of-ayah symbol .
Why does ﴿ look backwards in some apps?
Unlike standard parentheses, ornate Arabic brackets lack automatic bidirectional mirroring in Unicode, so mixed-direction text can display them pointing in an unexpected direction.
More like this
12
Collections with ﴿
7
How to type or find ﴿
- Also called
- Arabic ornate bracket · Arabic ornate quotation mark · Quran quotation bracket
- Search it as
- quran · quranic · quote · quotation · bracket · parenthesis · arabic · persian
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
﴿\FD3FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.