Urdu Harakat & Diacritic Remover

Paste any Urdu or Arabic text that contains harakat (vowel marks) and remove them all instantly with one click. Useful for creating clean, unvowelized versions of text for print, apps, or databases.

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What Are Harakat?

Harakat (حرکات) are the small vowel marks written above or below Arabic-script letters to indicate short vowel sounds. In Urdu, these marks are called zabar (زبر, the short "a" sound), zer (زیر, the short "i" sound), and pesh (پیش, the short "u" sound). Additional marks include shadda (شدّہ, indicating a doubled consonant), sukun (سکون, indicating no vowel), and tanwin (تنوین, indicating a nasal final vowel). Together these marks let readers who don't already know a word pronounce it correctly, which is why they appear heavily in the Quran, children's textbooks, and educational materials.

When to Remove Them

Most everyday Urdu text, including newspapers, novels, websites, and signage, is written without harakat, because fluent readers don't need them. Diacritical marks are added specifically for contexts where correct pronunciation matters more than reading speed, such as religious texts, children's reading materials, poetry collections, and formal Arabic documents. If you've received text with harakat that you need to clean up for a website, a database field, or a design where the marks clutter the visual appearance, this tool removes all of them in one operation.

What Gets Removed

This tool removes the following Unicode ranges: U+064B–U+065F (Arabic combining marks including all tanwin, zabar, zer, pesh, shadda, sukun, and related marks), U+0670 (Arabic superscript alef), and U+0610–U+061A and U+06D6–U+06ED (extended Arabic marks). Base letters are completely untouched — only the combining diacritical characters are stripped.

Frequently Asked Questions

Not the meaning, but it does remove pronunciation guidance. The base letters and words remain identical — only the vowel marks are stripped. Fluent readers will have no difficulty reading the result; it's simply the standard form in which most everyday Urdu text is written.
Yes, the tool processes any standard Unicode Arabic-script text. However, Quranic text without harakat loses its pronunciation guidance, which is significant for recitation purposes. This tool is intended for general design and text-processing use rather than religious preparation.
No. Those letters are base characters (not combining marks) and are completely untouched by this tool. Only the small floating marks are removed, not any letters.

Need to inspect which exact diacritical marks are in your text? Try our Unicode Inspector.

Practical Workflow Tips

When working with Quranic text or classical poetry that uses harakat, a common workflow is to maintain a "with harakat" master copy and generate a separate "clean" version for contexts where the marks would clutter the visual design. This tool handles the stripping step instantly, so there is no need to manually delete marks or use complex regular expressions in a text editor — paste, click, copy, and the clean version is ready.

After removing harakat, paste the result into our Unicode Inspector to confirm that only base letters remain, with no stray combining characters left behind.