Avagraha

Avagraha (ऽ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ a in many Indian languages as shown below. It is usually transliterated with apostrophe in roman script, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् Śivo’ham (Śivaḥ aham), which is a sandhi of (शिवः + अहम्) ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ! for ‘Mãããã!’ when calling to one’s mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as कूऽल.

In 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 छंदः chandaḥ ‘metre’ (in nominative) can be denoted as "ऽ ऽ", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "Systems of scansion".)

Avagraha in Unicode

The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Indic scripts that use it:

Avagraha characters in Unicode

Character	Unicode character number	Full Unicode name
ऽ	U+093D	Devanagari sign avagraha
꣱	U+A8F1	Combining Devanagari sign avagraha
ꣷ	U+A8F7	Devanagari sign candrabindu avagraha
ঽ	U+09BD	Bengali sign avagraha
ઽ	U+0ABD	Gujarati sign avagraha
ଽ	U+0B3D	Oriya sign avagraha
ఽ	U+0C3D	Telugu sign avagraha
ಽ	U+0CBD	Kannada sign avagraha
ഽ	U+0D3D	Malayalam sign avagraha
ᮺ	U+1BBA	Sundanese sign avagraha
𑓄	U+114C4	Tirhuta sign avagraha