Arabic alphabet
الأبجدية العربية
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, writes right-to-left, and is used by roughly half a billion people for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Uyghur, Kurdish, and more. It is an abjad — a script that primarily writes consonants, leaving short vowels to be inferred or marked with optional diacritics.
All 28 letters
History
Arabic script descends from Nabataean Aramaic, which itself came from Phoenician — meaning Arabic letters share a common ancestor with Greek and Latin several millennia back. The script took its recognizable form in the Hijaz (western Arabia) by the 5th century CE and was standardized for the writing of the Quran in the 7th century. Every letter has up to four contextual forms (isolated, initial, medial, final) depending on its position in a word — a design feature that makes Arabic script visually flowing but also the reason it took decades to render it well on computers. The cursive connection between letters is not optional; it is part of the spelling.
Things you might not know
- Short vowels (a, i, u) aren't usually written. Native speakers fill them in from context, the way English readers handle "bnk" → "bank".
- Every letter has up to four forms depending on whether it stands alone, starts a word, sits in the middle, or ends one.
- Six letters (ا د ذ ر ز و) never connect to the letter that follows them, creating visible breaks mid-word.
- The Persian, Urdu, and Pashto alphabets add extra letters (like پ, چ, گ, ژ) for sounds Arabic doesn't have.