Abugida
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A kind of syllabary (syllabic alphabet) in which a symbol or glyph representing a syllable contains parts representing a vowel and a consonant, such that symbols for syllables not including the default vowel are generated by adding a common notation to indicate the vowel that it does include.
"Words are entered under the Abugida system."
- 2 A kind of syllabary (syllabic alphabet) in which a symbol or glyph representing a syllable contains parts representing a vowel and a consonant, typically such that symbols for different syllables are generated by adding, altering or removing the vowel portion, often by applying a diacritic to a stable consonant symbol.
"1997 [Routledge], Peter T. Daniels, 2: Scripts of Semitic Languages, Robert Hetzron (editor), The Semitic Languages, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005, Transferred to Digital Printing, unnumbered page, For the scripts of the Semitic languages, five categories are needed: logography, syllabary, abjad, alphabet, and abugida. A sixth, featural script, appears when Arabic script is adapted to non-Semitic languages. […] (The English word "abugida" is borrowed from the Amharic term for the letters of the script when taken in the order known from the Ge'ez transliterations of the Hebrew letter names found in the superscriptions of the sections of Psalm 119, as used in the liturgy; it takes the first four consonants and the first four vowels in their traditional order of presentation.)"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"In addition, devanagari is an abugida, used for Sanskrit, Nepali and Hindi, in which the characters contain a final 'a'-sound if another vowel does not change the sound. However, Arabic and Hebrew use separate systems called abjads, in which the vowels are not always indicated."
Etymology
From Ge'ez አቡጊዳ (ʾäbugida). First use appears c. 1961. See cite below.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.