The Arabic Letter Dāl (د): Two Shapes, Sound and Words

د (dāl) is letter 8 of the 28 in the Arabic alphabet, between خ khāʾ and ذ dhāl. Its sound is d, as in door. It never joins to the letter after it, so it has two shapes: د ‍د. It is a sun letter, and its abjad value is 4.

Hear its name, دال (dāl):

Why dāl has two shapes, not four

Dāl is one of the six letters that never join to the letter after them: ا د ذ ر ز و. It joins only from the right, so its initial form is its isolated shape, د, and its medial form is its final shape, ‍د. A word breaks into a new piece after it: in دار (dār, home), the letter after dāl starts again.

Typed text stores both shapes as one character, U+062F (ARABIC LETTER DAL); U+FEA9 and U+FEAA are presentation forms that the Unicode Arabic FAQ does not recommend for regular text.

Dāl is number 13 of the 28 letters by frequency, 3.2% of all letters, in the 50,000 most common word forms of Arabic film and TV subtitles (hermitdave/FrequencyWords, OpenSubtitles 2018), each form counted as often as it occurs; it is final in 79% and alone in 21% of its occurrences.

How to pronounce dāl

The sound of dāl is d, as in door, written d in the transliteration of our Arabic alphabet chart. The chart's note on it reads: like English "d", tongue on the teeth.

Arabic words with dāl

These 5 everyday words show dāl in real writing: it is final in ولد and يد; alone in دار, درس and درب. The first three are the practice words printed on its worksheet; the others come from other letters' worksheets and our Arabic pronunciation guide, and more words by topic are in our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Dāl with al-, and its number

Dāl is a sun letter, so the l of al- (the) goes silent before it: الدار is said ad-dār, the home (test any word in our sun and moon letters checker).

Its abjad value is 4 in both the Mashriqi and the Maghribi order; our abjad calculator adds up whole words. Dāl is also one of the five qalqalah letters of Quran recitation, ق ط ب ج د: when its vowel is cancelled, by a sukūn or by stopping on it at the end of a sentence, reciters give it a slight bounce, as the Wikipedia article on tajweed describes. Our tajweed rules chart marks it in colour.

Letters that look like dāl

Dāl and ذ dhāl share the same hook, and only the dots tell them apart:

• د dāl: no dot
• ذ dhāl: one dot above

Dāl is the plain partner of ḍād ض, the emphatic d. Say دَرْب darb (path) with a bright vowel and ضَرْب ḍarb (hitting) with the tongue pulled back, and a listener should hear two different words.

Practise writing dāl

Trace it on the free dāl tracing worksheet (PDF, one page, 63 KB), which prints its two shapes beside دار (dār), ولد (walad) and يد (yad); the other 27 are on our Arabic writing worksheets page.

Words and names that start with dāl: Daniel in Arabic and David in Arabic.

Frequently asked questions

Keep learning Arabic

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