Avagraha


Avagraha is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ ' in many Indian languages like Sanskrit as shown below. It is usually transliterated with an apostrophe in Roman script and, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् ', which is a sandhi of ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ! for ‘Mā̃ā̃ā̃ā̃!’ when calling to one's mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as कूऽल. This symbol is more frequently used in the Eastern [Hindi languages|Eastern Hindi] and Bihari languages.
In the 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 ‘metre’ can be denoted as "ऽऽ", meaning two long syllables.

Avagraha in Unicode

The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Brahmic scripts that use it.
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+0B3DOdia sign avagraha
ఽU+0C3DTelugu sign avagraha
ಽU+0CBDKannada sign avagraha
᤹U+1939Limbu sign mukphreng
ഽU+0D3DMalayalam sign avagraha
ᮺU+1BBASundanese sign avagraha
?U+114C4Tirhuta sign avagraha
྅U+0F85Tibetan sign paluta
ៜ ‍‍U+17DCKhmer sign avakraha
ᢅU+1885Mongolian Galik sign baluda