Avagraha

Avagraha (ऽ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ a in many Nepali and Indian languages as shown below. It is usually transliterated with apostrophe in roman script, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् Śivo’ham (Śivaḥ aham), which is a sandhi of (शिवः + अहम्) ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ! for ‘Mãããã!’ when calling to one’s mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as कूऽल.

In case of Hindi, the character is also sometimes used as a symbol to denote long or heavy syllables, in metrical poetry. For example, the syllables in the word छंदः chandaḥ ‘metre’ (in nominative) can be denoted as "ऽ ऽ", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "Systems of scansion".)

Avagraha in Unicode

The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Indic scripts that use it:

Avagraha characters in Unicode
CharacterUnicode character numberFull Unicode name
ऽU+093DDevanagari sign avagraha
꣱U+A8F1Combining Devanagari sign avagraha
ꣷU+A8F7Devanagari sign candrabindu avagraha
ঽU+09BDBengali sign avagraha
ઽU+0ABDGujarati sign avagraha
ଽU+0B3DOriya sign avagraha
ఽU+0C3DTelugu sign avagraha
ಽU+0CBDKannada sign avagraha
ഽU+0D3DMalayalam sign avagraha
ᮺU+1BBASundanese sign avagraha
𑓄U+114C4Tirhuta sign avagraha
྅U+0F85Tibetan sign paluta
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