Meem

Arabic /m/ — a small loop and a tail.

Sound

Meem is /m/, a voiced bilabial nasal — exactly the same sound as English m. Straightforward for English speakers, with no positional or dialectal variation worth flagging. Pronouncing it as you would in English will produce the right sound.

Meem is one of the most frequent letters in Arabic. It carries several major morphological prefixes — the mu- participles (مُـ, as in muslim, mudarris), the ma- places (مَـ, as in masjid, maktab), and the mi- instruments. Because of this, meem appears at the start of an enormous number of words, far more often than in English.

Forms

Connecting behavior

Meem connects on both sides.

Easy to confuse with

Faa (ف) and qaaf (ق) at small sizes — all three letters share a small bowl shape in some positions. But meem has no dots and the stem behavior differs: meem's tail (in isolated and final form) drops vertically below the baseline like a hanging stroke, whereas faa sits cleanly on the line and qaaf has a wider, deeper bowl. The presence or absence of dots is also decisive — meem has none.

Examples in common words

A note on handwriting

A small round head and a tail that drops below the baseline. In Ruq'ah-style handwriting — the dominant casual style across the Arab world — the tail of isolated and final meem is often abbreviated or absorbed into the next stroke, and the head is sometimes drawn so quickly that it nearly closes flat. Despite the simplifications, meem stays distinctive because nothing else in the alphabet hangs below the line in quite that way.