Arabic
A fully cursive abjad — its letters join, change shape by position, and are told apart by dots. The second most widely used script on Earth.
Curatorial note
Arabic descends from Phoenician by the eastern road — through Aramaic and then the flowing Nabataean cursive of Petra. By the time it stabilised it was already joined-up writing: there is no "printed" form with letters standing apart, the way Latin has.
Two features define it. First, most letters take up to four shapes depending on where they fall in a word — isolated, initial, medial, final — and connect to their neighbours. Second, many letters share the same skeleton and are distinguished only by dots placed above or below (the i'jam): ب ت ث are one shape with one, two, three dots.
Written at speed from the very start — Arabic never learned to hold its letters apart.
Short vowels, like other abjads, are usually left out and supplied by the reader; when needed they are added as small marks (harakat). The same descent that carried the alphabet west to Greek and Latin runs east and south here — see the Hall of Lineages for the full route from Phoenician through Aramaic and Nabataean.
The four faces of a letter
One letter, four joined shapesThe twenty-eight letters
Alif to Ya · read right to leftThe traditional abjad order (أبجد هوز …) preserves the old Phoenician/Aramaic sequence and gives the letters numeric values; the order above is the modern dictionary order that groups letters by shared shape.
Specimen — Noto Sans Arabic
Waterfall on baseline gridIn the building
In the Reading Room
The Cursive Imperative
Why Arabic has four shapes for most letters and no separated "print" form — a script that joined its letters before it ever met a printing press.
Plaque sources: The Unicode Standard (Arabic block; Arabic Presentation Forms) · ISO 15924 (Arab · 160) · B. Gruendler, The Development of the Arabic Scripts · standard palaeography of early Arabic · ScriptSource (SIL). User figures are estimates. Compiled 2026-07.