Avagraha (, ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision 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 philosophical expression (), which is a sandhi of ( + ) ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi for ‘Mā̃ā̃ā̃ā̃!’ when calling to one's mother. This symbol is more frequently used in the Eastern Hindi and Bihari languages especially Bhojpuri language.
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) can be denoted as "", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "Systems of scansion".) Glyph comparison
Avagraha in Unicode The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Brahmic scripts that use it.
+ Avagraha characters in Unicode Character Unicode character number Full Unicode nameऽ U+093D Devanagari sign avagraha꣱ U+A8F1 Combining Devanagari sign avagrahaꣷ U+A8F7 Devanagari sign candrabindu avagrahaঽ U+09BD Bengali sign avagrahaઽ U+0ABD Gujarati sign avagrahaଽ U+0B3D Odia sign avagrahaఽ U+0C3D Telugu sign avagrahaಽ U+0CBD Kannada sign avagrahaഽ U+0D3D Malayalam sign avagraha᤹U+1939Limbu sign mukphrengᮺ U+1BBA Sundanese sign avagraha྅ U+0F85 Tibetan mark palutaៜ U+17DC Khmer sign avakrahasanya ᢅ U+1885 Mongolian letter Ali Gali baludaᢆ U+1886 Mongolian letter Ali Gali three baluda𑍝U+1135DGrantha sign pluta𑑇 U+11447 Newa sign avagraha𑓄 U+114C4 Tirhuta sign avagraha𑧡 U+119E1 Nandinagari sign avagraha𑪝U+11A9DSoyombo mark pluta𑱀U+11C40 Bhaiksuki sign avagraha
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