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abjad

Pronunciation: /ˈæbˌd͡ʒæd/

The English word “abjad” has 3 meanings listed here.

noun

  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.
  2. Any writing system in which glyphs are used to represent consonants or consonantal phonemes, but not vowels.
  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.

Etymology

Borrowed from Arabic أَبْجَد (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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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.