Browse every letter of the Urdu alphabet (اردو حروف تہجی) with an example word, a plain-English pronunciation note, and its Unicode codepoint. Search by letter, sound, or keyword to find what you need quickly.
The Urdu alphabet contains 38 to 39 letters depending on how certain variant forms are counted, built on the Perso-Arabic script with several letters added specifically to capture sounds common in Indo-Aryan languages but absent from Arabic and Persian. These additions include retroflex consonants like ٹ (tte), ڈ (ddal), and ڑ (rre), produced by curling the tongue back against the roof of the mouth, a sound family entirely foreign to Arabic phonology. The nasal ں (noon ghunna) is another Urdu-specific addition, producing a nasalized vowel sound similar to the "ng" tone at the end of "sing" rather than a fully pronounced "n."
Several letters in this list also have multiple pronunciations that have merged in everyday spoken Urdu, even though they remain distinct in formal Arabic. Letters like ث، س، and ص are all commonly pronounced as a simple "s" in casual Urdu speech, despite having different points of articulation in classical Arabic. This is normal and expected. For a deeper look at why letters change shape depending on their position within a word, see our article on the four forms of every Arabic-script letter.
Beginning learners use this as a companion while studying Urdu reading and writing, particularly for the Urdu-specific letters that don't exist in Arabic and therefore aren't covered by general Arabic-learning resources. Developers and font testers use it as a quick checklist to confirm a font or input method correctly supports the full Urdu character set, not just the base Arabic letters. Parents and educators use it as a simple, ad-free reference when teaching children the alphabet at home.
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