The six other letters that do not correspond to any north Semitic letter are placed at the end. In the Maghrebi abjad sequence, the letter tsade צ was split into two independent Arabic letters, ض ḍad and ص ṣad, with the latter taking the place of sameḵ.

In the Mashriqi abjad sequence, the letter shin ש was split into two Arabic letters, ش shīn and ﺱ sīn, the latter of which took the place of sameḵ.

The loss of sameḵ was compensated for by: The ʾabjadī order is not a simple correspondence with the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, as it has a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter samek ס, which has no cognate letter in the Arabic alphabet historically. The ordering groups letters by the graphical similarity of the glyphs' shapes. The hijā’ī or alifbāʾī order is used when sorting lists of words and names, such as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries. With this ordering, letters are also used as numbers known as abjad numerals, possessing the same numerological codes as in Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The original ʾabjadī order derives from that used by the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore reminiscent of the orderings of other alphabets, such as those in Hebrew and Greek. There are two main collating sequences ('alphabetical orderings') for the Arabic alphabet: ʾabjadīy, and hijā’ī. The letter ن n also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot added above, though it is somewhat different in its isolated and final forms.īoth printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most letters within a word directly joined to adjacent letters. For example, the Arabic letters ب b, ت t, and ث th have the same basic shape, but with one dot added below, two dots added above, and three dots added above respectively.

These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots ( ʾiʿjām) above or below their central part ( rasm). There are no distinct upper and lower case letterforms. Forms using the Arabic script to write other languages added and removed letters: for example Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Azerbaijani, Malay, Pashto, Punjabi, Uyghur, Arwi and Arabi Malayalam all have additional letters in their alphabets. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet ( Arabic: الْأَبْجَدِيَّة الْعَرَبِيَّة, al-abjadīyah al-ʿarabīyah or الْحُرُوف الْعَرَبِيَّة, al-ḥurūf l-ʿarabīyah), or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. 18 CE (derived from Eastern Arabic numerals and Brahmi numerals) BCEĪdlam (slight influence from Arabic) 1989 CE Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c.Cherokee (syllabary letter forms only) c.

Two dots above a letter computer