Arabic alphabet
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Date: 2019-01-17

Arabic alphabet, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2204 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes
#Arabic orthography
#Arabic alphabet
Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet ( ', or ') or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing Arabic. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. Most letters have contextual letterforms.

Originally, the alphabet was an abjad, with only consonants, but it is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other "abjads", such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel diacritics.

The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages added and removed some letters, as for Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Malay, Pashto, Arwi and Malayalam (Arabi Malayalam), all of which have additional letters as shown below. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms.

Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots (') above or below their central part ('). These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters ب (b), ت (t), and ث (th) have the same basic shape, but have one dot below, two dots above, and three dots above; the letter ن (n) also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot above, though it is somewhat different in isolated and final form.

Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters.

There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet: abjad and hija.

The original "" order (), used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. In this order, letters are also used as numbers, Abja...