Daal

The plain Arabic d — a small angled stroke that does not connect to its left.

Sound

Daal is /d/, like the d in English day: a voiced dental stop, made with the tongue against the upper teeth. As with taa, the Arabic version is a touch more dental than the English alveolar /d/, but the difference is too small to matter for an English speaker. Treat it as the English d and you will be understood.

Daal is the non-emphatic counterpart of Daad (ض), the famously difficult emphatic. Plain daal stays clear and front; the emphatic darkens and retracts. They are different letters, not variants.

Daal is consistent across dialects. The only marginal note: in some loanwords daal stands in for foreign /d/ that is non-dental in the source language, with no audible consequence in Arabic.

Forms

Connecting behavior

Daal is a non-connector to the left. It joins to the letter on its right whenever there is one, but it never extends a tail to its left. As a consequence, daal always ends a connected segment within a word — anything that follows it has to begin as if starting a new word. This is the property it shares with alif, dhaal, raa, zaay, and waw.

Easy to confuse with

Daal looks most like dhaal (ذ) — same shape, with a dot added above. The dotless one is daal. It can also be confused at first with raa (ر), but the difference is the baseline: daal sits squarely on the line, while raa dips below. Daal's angle is also sharper, raa's a longer curve.

Examples in common words

A note on handwriting

By hand, daal is essentially a single sharp angle — a quick stroke down from upper-right and back up — drawn without lifting the pen. It is small. The width should be enough to distinguish it from raa, whose curve is longer and crosses below the baseline. In rapid writing the angle of daal can soften but the foot must remain on the line.