Why one letter has four shapes

English print keeps each letter separate, but Arabic is always joined up, like English handwriting. So a letter is drawn differently depending on whether it stands alone, starts a word, sits in the middle, or ends it. Take Bāʼ (b): on its own it is ب, but inside a word it slims down to a tooth with a dot, as in بـبـب.

There is one catch the explorer flags: six letters — ا د ذ ر ز و — are non-connectors. They join the letter before them but refuse to join the one after, leaving a small gap mid-word. That is not a space between words; it is just a stubborn letter.

The dots are the letters

About fifteen of the 28 letters are told apart only by dots — in Arabic, iʻjām. One curved tooth is ب (b) with a dot below, ت (t) with two dots above, or ث (th) with three. The same deep curve is ح (a breathy h), خ (kh) or ج (j), depending entirely on the dot.

Those dots were not in the earliest Arabic writing at all — readers were expected to know the word from context. They were added in the seventh century precisely so the rapidly spreading text of the Quran could be read unambiguously. The spot-the-dot game below is built on exactly this.

The invisible vowels: harakat

Because Arabic is an abjad, short vowels are not letters. They are small marks — harakat — added above or below a consonant, and most everyday text leaves them out entirely. Here they are on the letter Bāʼ:

This is why the Quran and children’s books look more “decorated” than a newspaper: they print the harakat so every word is read exactly right, while fluent adult readers supply the vowels from memory.

Sun letters and moon letters

Arabic has one word for “the”: al- (ال). But its “l” is not always pronounced. Before the 14 sun letters, the l vanishes and the next sound doubles instead: “the sun” is written al-shams but said ash-shams. Before the 14 moon letters, the l stays put: “the moon” is al-qamar, exactly as written.

The names come from those two words themselves — shams (sun) starts with a sun letter, qamar (moon) with a moon letter. The explorer tags each letter as sun or moon so you can see the split.

The word “abjad” is hiding your A-B-C

The 28 letters are usually taught in a tidy modern order grouped by shape — but there is an older order, the abjadī sequence, that begins alif, bāʼ, jīm, dāl. Read those first four aloud: a–b–j–d. That is where the word “abjad” comes from, and it is not a coincidence that it sounds like reciting your A-B-C-D.

Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and the Latin alphabet you are reading right now are all descendants of the same ancestor — the Phoenician abjad of roughly three thousand years ago, which itself ran aleph, bet, gimel, dalet. Greek borrowed that order and those names to make alpha, beta, gamma, delta; Latin passed it to us as A, B, C, D. Arabic kept the original Semitic order alive in its abjadī sequence, and still uses those letters as numbers, the way Greek and Roman letters once were.

So the script that looks most foreign to an English reader is, underneath, a close cousin running the other way. The 28 letters of Arabic and the 26 of English are two branches of one family tree — and both of them are still quietly reciting the same opening line their shared ancestor sang: a, b, c, d.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Britannica and standard references — 28 letters, all consonants, written right to left; Alif, Waw, Yāʼ double as long vowels.
• Contextual forms (isolated / initial / medial / final); the six non-connectors ا د ذ ر ز و; the compulsory lām-alif ligature.
• Abjad classification and harakat (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, sukūn, shadda); the hamza sometimes counted to make 29.
• The dots (iʻjām) added in the 7th century to disambiguate the Quranic text; sun vs moon letters and al- assimilation.
• Descent from the Phoenician/Aramaic/Nabataean abjad; the abjadī order (alif-bāʼ-jīm-dāl) shared with Greek alpha-beta-gamma-delta and Latin A-B-C-D.

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