Arabic

Arabic is a Unicode block, containing the standard letters and the most common diacritics of the Arabic script, and the Arabic-Indic digits.

The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, the Sorani and Luri dialects of Kurdish, Persian, Pashto, and Urdu. Even until the 16th century, it was used to write some texts in Spanish. After the Latin script, Chinese characters, and Devanagari, it is the fourth-most widely used writing system in the world. The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads. The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼān, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write languages of many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols, with some versions, such as Kurdish, Uyghur, and old Bosnian being abugidas or true alphabets. It is also the basis for a rich tradition of Arabic calligraphy.