Arabic Alphabet Chart: Every Letter in All Four Forms

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters and is written right to left. Most letters change shape depending on where they sit in a word, so every letter has four forms: isolated, initial, medial, and final. Six letters never join to the letter after them. The chart below gives all four forms for all 28 letters, with transliteration and pronunciation.

The full Arabic alphabet chart

The Arabic letters run from alif to yāʾ in the standard هجائي (hijāʾī) order used in Arabic classrooms. The chart gives each positional form, the letter name in Arabic and in English, transliteration, a pronunciation note, and whether the letter is a sun letter or a moon letter. Every cell is real text rather than a picture, so you can copy any letter straight out of the table. The characters are the standard Unicode Arabic block letters, so anything you copy will paste correctly into any editor.

Legend. The dagger (†) marks the six letters that do not join to the letter after them. For those six, the initial form is the isolated shape and the medial form is the final shape. One transliteration scheme is used throughout, the one in the Library of Congress ALA-LC Arabic romanization tables: a macron for long vowels (ā ī ū), a dot underneath for the emphatic consonants (ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ), ʿ for ayn and ʾ for hamza. The chat alphabet further down is a different convention and is labelled as one.

How to read the chart

Which form of an Arabic letter you write depends only on what it has to connect to on each side. A letter takes its initial form at the start of a word, its medial form when letters join it on both sides, its final form at the end of a word, and its isolated form when nothing joins it on either side. Arabic joins its letters the way English cursive does. The difference is that Arabic does it in print too, not only in handwriting.

Take مكتب (maktab, office). All four of its letters connect, so you read straight down the chart: initial م‍, medial ‍ك‍, medial ‍ت‍, final ‍ب. Written together they fuse into مكتب.

Now take باب (bāb, door). The middle letter is ا (alif), which does not join forward. So the first ب takes its initial form ب‍, the alif takes its final form ‍ا because a letter reaches it from the right, and the second ب falls back to its isolated form ب because nothing reaches it at all: باب. Three letters, two visible pieces, one word.

Six letters break the chain. Learn them early, because they are the reason a single Arabic word can look like two or three separate pieces: ا alif, د dāl, ذ dhāl, ر rāʾ, ز zāy, و wāw.

Arabic has no upper case and no lower case. The four forms are the whole system, and there is nothing else to memorise about the shapes themselves.

What are sun letters and moon letters?

The 28 letters split into 14 sun letters and 14 moon letters, and the split decides how you pronounce the definite article ال (al-, "the"). Before a moon letter you pronounce the l. Before a sun letter the l goes silent and the following consonant doubles instead. The spelling never changes, only the pronunciation. That is the entire rule, and the last column of the chart above tells you which side any letter is on.

The names come from the two example words themselves: القمر (al-qamar, the moon) keeps its l, and الشمس (ash-shams, the sun) loses it.

There is a shortcut hiding in that list. All 14 sun letters are pronounced with the tip of the tongue at or just behind the teeth, which is exactly where the l of al- is made. The tongue is already in position, so it stays there and doubles the next sound. Moon letters are made further back in the mouth or with the lips, so the l survives. You can memorise the 14, or you can feel where your tongue goes.

The chat alphabet: Arabic sounds written with numbers

Arabic speakers texting in Latin script write the sounds English has no letter for as digits, chosen because the digit looks like the Arabic letter. It is normal in Arabic WhatsApp threads and Instagram comments, so it is worth being able to read even if you never write it. It is a separate convention from the transliteration in the main chart, and the two should not be mixed in one sentence.

If you intend to write Arabic properly rather than in chat form, install a real keyboard early. Our guide to Arabic keyboard layouts and typing tools covers the built-in options on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

Letters that are not among the 28

Four written symbols look like letters, turn up constantly, and are not counted among the 28. This is also why some sources say the Arabic alphabet has 29 letters: they are counting the hamza, which is a sound with its own symbol rather than a member of the alphabet.

Short vowels are not letters either. The marks that write a, i and u (فتحة fatḥa, كسرة kasra, ضمة ḍamma) sit above or below the consonant, and adult reading material leaves them out: newspapers, novels, signs, subtitles. Children's books, textbooks and the Quran print them. So finishing the alphabet does not mean you can read. You will be working the vowels out from context for a long time afterwards, and that is normal.

One more boundary worth drawing. These 28 letters cover Modern Standard Arabic and every spoken Arabic dialect, from Moroccan to Gulf, with no additions. Persian, Urdu and Pashto are written in the same script but add letters of their own for sounds Arabic does not have, so a Persian keyboard carries more letters than this chart has rows.

How to learn these letters faster than the chart order

Do not learn the 28 letters one at a time in chart order. Learn them in shape families instead. Arabic reuses one skeleton for two or three letters and changes only the dots, so 28 shapes collapse into nine families plus eight one-offs. Learning ب hands you most of ت and ث for free.

• ب ت ث: the same tooth, with one dot below, two dots above, three dots above
• ج ح خ: the same belly, with a dot inside, no dot, a dot above
• د ذ: the same hook, plain or dotted
• ر ز: the same curve, plain or dotted
• س ش: three teeth, plain or with three dots
• ص ض: the same loop, plain or dotted
• ط ظ: the same body, plain or dotted
• ع غ: the same shape, plain or dotted
• ف ق: near identical when joined, one dot above versus two
• The eight with no twin: ا ك ل م ن ه و ي

ن and ي are listed as one-offs because their isolated shapes stand alone, but in the middle of a word both ride the same tooth as ب ت ث, with one dot above for nūn and two dots below for yāʾ. The medial column of the chart shows it.

When I started, I learned the letters from Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah, a book built around pronouncing each letter correctly rather than naming it, and I copied every letter by hand in a workbook until the four forms came out without thinking, then drilled them in Anki every day. Reading speed is the honest measure of whether the alphabet has landed. It took me 20 minutes to get through one page of the Quran at first, and eventually 2 minutes. The full account is in how I learned Arabic as an adult.

Two things we recommend from the first day. Say the letter's sound while you write it, not its name, because ب is "b" in every word and "bāʾ" in none of them. And write by hand from the first day: the four forms are a motor skill, and recognising a shape on a screen does not teach your hand where the letter starts.

For books, apps and courses that teach the alphabet with audio, see our list of Arabic alphabet books and courses. If you have not worked out how to structure your study yet, start with our guide to learning Arabic from zero.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters are in the Arabic alphabet?

Twenty-eight. Some sources say 29 because they count the hamza, the glottal stop, which has its own symbol but is treated as a sound rather than a member of the alphabet. The 28-letter count is what Arabic schools teach, and it is the count used in the chart on this page.

Why do Arabic letters change shape in a word?

Arabic joins its letters in print the same way English joins them in cursive, so a letter is drawn differently depending on what it has to connect to. Each letter has an isolated form when nothing joins it, an initial form at the start of a word, a medial form with letters on both sides, and a final form at the end. The letter is the same letter in all four; only the drawing changes.

Which Arabic letters do not connect to the next letter?

Six: alif, dal, dhal, ra, zay and waw. They join to the letter before them but never to the letter after, so a word containing one of them breaks into separate visual chunks.

What are sun letters and moon letters?

The 28 letters divide into 14 sun letters and 14 moon letters, and the split governs the definite article al-. Before a moon letter the l is pronounced, as in al-qamar (the moon). Before a sun letter the l goes silent and the following consonant doubles, so al-shams is pronounced ash-shams (the sun). The spelling is unchanged either way. Every sun letter is made with the tip of the tongue near the teeth, which is where the l is made, so the tongue simply stays put.

Should I learn the letter names or the letter sounds first?

The sounds. A letter name is only useful for spelling something out loud, while the sound is what you need to read every word you meet. Learn the sound while writing the letter by hand, and pick up the names later as a by-product.

Related Arabic reference charts

The other charts on this site cover the parts of Arabic that are easier to look up than to memorise.

• Arabic numbers from 1 to 100. The Eastern Arabic numerals, the Western digits and the spoken words, side by side.
• Common Arabic phrases. Every phrase given in Modern Standard Arabic, Levantine and Egyptian, so you can see exactly what changes between them.
• Our Arabic vocabulary hub. Word lists and the resources we use to build them.
• Arabic keyboards and typing tools. How to type the letters in this chart on any device.