Abjad
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A writing system for Arabic, historically also employed as a numeral system, in which there is one glyph (symbol or letter) for each consonant but vowels are not specified.
"In Rabghuzi's Stories of the Prophets, a teacher asked Jesus, who was seven years old at the time, to repeat the alphabet and the abjad by rote."
- 2 Any writing system in which glyphs are used to represent consonants or consonantal phonemes, but not vowels.
"Languages that use abjads include Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. Abjads differ from syllabaries (such as the Japanese hiragana) in that the vowel quality of each letter is left unspecified, and must be inferred from context and grammar."
- 3 The system of abjad numerals; a numeral system in which the letters of the Arabic abjad are interpreted as numerals, typically used to enumerate lists and nested lists, as well as in numerology.
"1971, Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan, Aakar Books, 2nd Edition, 2005 Reprint, page 399, The other names had no significance, except that the initial letter of each month denoted its place in the calendar according to the abjad system, which assigned a certain numerical power to every letter in the alphabet."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"I have already learned to write the Abjad."
Etymology
From Arabic أبجد (ʔabjad), the term for the traditional ordering of the Arabic script (from the first four letters: أ (ʔ), ب (b), ج (j), د (d)). Compare English ABC and alphabet. Linguistics sense coined by Peter T. Daniels.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.