Avagraha () is a symbol used to indicate

prodelision Prodelision is a form of elision where, in a string of two words, the latter word loses its initial vowel(s). Example: "Namqu(e) etsi nullum memorabile nomen femine(a) in poena (e)st, habet haec victoria laudem, exstinxisse nefas." (Aeneid 2.583- ...

of an ''()'' 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 Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

philosophical expression ' ('), which is a

sandhi Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...

of ( + ) ‘I am

Shiva Shiva (; sa, शिव, lit=The Auspicious One, Śiva ), also known as Mahadeva (; ɐɦaːd̪eːʋɐ, or Hara, is one of the principal deities of Hinduism. He is the Supreme Being in Shaivism, one of the major traditions within Hindu ...

’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

for ‘Mãããã!’ when calling to one's mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as . 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 ' ‘metre’ (in

nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...

) can be denoted as "", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "

Systems of scansion Scansion ( , rhymes with ''mansion''; verb: ''to scan''), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. In classical poetry, these patterns are ...

".)

Avagraha in Unicode

The avagraha symbol is encoded at several

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

points, for various

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

that use it.

References

Brahmic diacritics {{Writingsystem-stub