Browse  ·  Urdu Alphabet

Muslim Names by the Urdu Alphabet

2,451 Muslim baby names sorted by the Urdu letter they begin with. Urdu is not Arabic with extra letters, and the difference is why a name you know as نور can be hard to find under N.

31 letter pages

Why the Urdu alphabet is not the Arabic one

Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script, which is not the same as being written in Arabic. It keeps all twenty-eight Arabic letters, takes four more from Persian (پ چ ژ گ) for sounds Arabic does not have, and then adds its own: the retroflex series ٹ ڈ ڑ, made by curling the tongue back, and ھ, the two-eyed he, which exists only to aspirate the letter before it.

It also writes three shared letters differently. Where Arabic writes ك ي ه, Urdu writes ک ی ہ. A name spelled with the Arabic forms will still be read, but it is not how a family in Lahore or Karachi writes it, which is why this site gives the Arabic spelling and the Urdu spelling separately on every name.

One more thing follows from all this. Urdu sounds ث س ص all as s, and ذ ز ض ظ all as z. Four letters, one sound. That is why a single English spelling can point back to four different Urdu letters, and why entering through the Urdu form finds names the English spelling hides.

Every letter, and the names behind it

2,451 names sorted by the Urdu letter they open with, not by their English transliteration. The alphabet reads right to left.

The letters with almost nothing behind them

Four letters open so few names that they do not carry a page of their own. They are still part of the alphabet, and the names are here.

Other ways in

The same library, sorted differently: by English letter, by what the name means, by where it is used, or by the Ilm ul Huroof reading of each Arabic letter.

Questions about names in the Urdu alphabet

How many letters are in the Urdu alphabet?
Thirty-nine in the standard count: the twenty-eight of Arabic, four taken from Persian (پ چ ژ گ), the three retroflex letters Urdu made for itself (ٹ ڈ ڑ), the two-eyed he (ھ), and the two forms ے and ں. Counts differ between sources because some fold the variant forms together.
Is Urdu written in Arabic?
No. Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script, which is a different thing. It uses the Arabic letters and adds seven of its own, and it writes ک ی ہ where Arabic writes ك ي ه. The scripts look alike and are not interchangeable.
Why does one English spelling point to several Urdu letters?
Because Urdu has more letters than sounds in places. ث, س and ص are all sounded s, and ذ, ز, ض and ظ are all sounded z. An English "S" or "Z" flattens that distinction, so entering through the Urdu letter finds names the English spelling cannot separate.
How many Muslim names does AsrNaam hold in Urdu?
2,451, every one with its Urdu spelling as a South Asian family writes it, alongside the Arabic spelling, the meaning, and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading.