Arabic Alphabet
All 28 Arabic letters with names, sounds, and the four positional forms — searchable and copyable.
Arabic reads right to left. Click a letter to copy it; the four boxes show how it looks in each position.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters and is an abjad — it writes consonants and long vowels, while short vowels are shown by optional marks. It runs right to left, from ا (alif) to ي (yāʾ), and is cursive, so most letters change shape depending on where they sit in a word.
How the Arabic script works
Arabic is written and read from right to left. It is a cursive script: within a word the letters join up, so a single letter can take up to four shapes — isolated, initial, medial, and final — depending on its position and its neighbours. The table above shows each of the 28 letters in all four positions; click any letter to copy its isolated form.
An abjad, not an alphabet in the usual sense
Arabic is an abjad, meaning the letters stand for consonants and the long vowels ā, ū, and ī (carried by ا, و, and ي). The short vowels a, u, and i are not full letters; they are marked, when needed, by small diacritics called harakāt written above or below a letter. In everyday text these marks are usually left out, and readers supply them from context.
The emphatic consonants
Four letters are “emphatic” — pronounced deeper, with the back of the tongue raised — and change the colour of nearby vowels.
| Letter | Name | Sound | Plain counterpart |
|---|---|---|---|
| ص | ṣād | emphatic s | س sīn (s) |
| ض | ḍād | emphatic d | د dāl (d) |
| ط | ṭāʾ | emphatic t | ت tāʾ (t) |
| ظ | ẓāʾ | emphatic dh / z | ذ dhāl (dh) |
Non-connecting letters, sun and moon letters, and vowels
Six letters — ا, د, ذ, ر, ز, and و — never join to the letter that follows them. They connect only to the letter before, so they have no true initial or medial shape; after one of them the next letter starts fresh in its isolated or initial form. This is why the four-form boxes for these letters repeat the isolated shape.
The 28 letters also split into “sun letters” and “moon letters”, which decides how the definite article al- (ال) is said. Before a sun letter (such as ت, د, ر, س, ش, ن) the l assimilates into the following consonant, which doubles — al-shams (“the sun”) is pronounced ash-shams. Before a moon letter (such as ب, ج, ح, ك, م) the l is pronounced clearly, as in al-qamar (“the moon”). The spelling with ل never changes; only the pronunciation does.
Because the short vowels (harakāt) are usually left unwritten, the same sequence of letters can be read several ways until context settles it. Beginner texts, the Qur’an, and children’s books add the marks in full; ordinary newspapers and books almost never do.