Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word ء. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word ء, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say ء in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word ء you have here. The definition of the word ء will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofء, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
Most Arabic dialects early on lost the Proto-Semitic glottal stop, which caused compensatory lengthening of a preceding short vowel. At the beginning of the Islamic period only some of the most conservative lects preserved the consonant. Therefore it was not reflected in the spelling: One generally wrote and pronounced ذِيب(ḏīb, “wolf”), for example. The grammarians, however, favoured the conservative pronunciation and indicated the glottal stop with various diacritic marks, which ultimately led to the contemporary ذِئْب(ḏiʔb).
Hamza (ء) is a sign in the Arabic script that represents the glottal stop /ʔ/. It can be considered a diacritic or a letter, but it is not counted among the 28 letters of the alphabet. The exact spelling of the glottal stop depends on the combination of vowels that follow and precede it. It may be written with آ/ʔaː/, أ/ʔa/, /aʔ/, /ʔu/, إ/ʔi/, ئ/ʔi/, /iʔ/, ؤ/ʔu/, /uʔ/, or, usually after a long vowel, ء.
Usage notes
The curious vowel-dependent spelling of ء means that the triptotic noun declension, which is normally not reflected in the spelling, may become visible before a pronominal suffix. Compare: أَصْدِقاؤُنَا(ʔaṣdiqāʔunā, “our friends”, nominative), أَصْدِقائِنَا(ʔaṣdiqāʔinā, genitive), أَصْدِقاءَنَا(ʔaṣdiqāʔanā, accusative).
Unlike other languages using the Arabic script, Urdu does not commonly use Hamza as a glottal stop. Its primary usage is to act as a zero consonant to allow two adjacent vowels; گاؤں(gāõ), for example, is pronounced /ɡɑː.õ/ not /ɡɑː.ʔõ/.
