Home: go to the homepage U+0600 to U+06FF Arabic
Glyph for U+0627
Source: Noto Sans Arabic

U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef

U+0627 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block U+0600 to U+06FF Arabic in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Arabic script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it is written as Arabic letter from right to left. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+0627 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it. The glyph can be confused with one other glyph.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶףʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.

Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ([ʔ]), the sound found in the catch in uh-oh. In Arabic, the alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. In texts with diacritical marks, the pronunciation of an aleph as a consonant is rarely indicated by a special marking, hamza in Arabic and mappiq in Tiberian Hebrew. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). When this practice began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE). Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph.

Representations

System Representation
1575
UTF-8 D8 A7
UTF-16 06 27
UTF-32 00 00 06 27
URL-Quoted %D8%A7
HTML hex reference ا
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ا
Encoding: ISO-8859-6 (hex bytes) C7
Encoding: WINDOWS-1256 (hex bytes) C7
Adobe Glyph List afii57415
Adobe Glyph List alefarabic
digraph a+

Related Characters

Confusables

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na) ARABIC LETTER ALEF
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Arabic
General Category (gc) Other Letter
Script (sc) Arabic
Bidirectional Category (bc) Arabic Letter
Combining Class (ccc) Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt) none
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
Alphabetic (Alpha)
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
Composition Exclusion (CE)
Case Ignorable (CI)
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
Cased (Cased)
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
Dash (Dash)
Deprecated (Dep)
Diacritic (Dia)
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
Emoji Component (EComp)
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
Emoji (Emoji)
Extender (Ext)
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
Hex Digit (Hex)
Hyphen (Hyphen)
ID Continue (IDC)
ID Start (IDS)
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
IDSU (IDSU) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start) 0
Ideographic (Ideo)
InCB (InCB) None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
Indic Positional Category (InPC) NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC) Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
Join Control (Join_C)
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
Math (Math)
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC) Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC) Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
Other ID Start (OIDS)
Other Lowercase (OLower)
Other Math (OMath)
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
Quotation Mark (QMark)
Regional Indicator (RI)
Radical (Radical)
Sentence Break (SB) Other Letter
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Alphabetic Letter
White Space (WSpace)
XID Continue (XIDC)
XID Start (XIDS)
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) Alef
Joining Type (jt) Right Joining
Line Break (lb) Alphabetic
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo) R