Noon

Arabic /n/ — deep bowl, single dot above.

Sound

Noon is /n/, a voiced alveolar nasal — the same sound as English n. There are no surprises for English speakers; pronouncing it as you would in English produces the correct value.

Noon assimilates in some grammatical contexts. The tanwiin endings (-un, -an, -in) — the indefinite case markers in classical Arabic — end in /n/ but are written as doubled diacritics rather than as the letter noon, and many of them are dropped in modern speech. Noon also serves as a personal-pronoun and verbal suffix marker (-naa "we / us / our," -nii "me," etc.), which makes it very common at word boundaries.

Forms

Connecting behavior

Noon connects on both sides.

Easy to confuse with

Noon is at the centre of the most-confused group in the Arabic alphabet. In initial and medial position, the body of the letter is a small tooth on the line, indistinguishable in shape from baa, taa, and thaa — only the dots tell them apart:

• Baa (ب) — one dot below.
• Taa (ت) — two dots above.
• Thaa (ث) — three dots above.
• Noon (ن) — one dot above.

In isolated and final position noon is easier to spot because its bowl is deeper and dips below the baseline, while baa, taa, and thaa sit on the line. The deep bowl is the silhouette to look for.

Examples in common words

A note on handwriting

The deep bowl that dips below the baseline is the key visual cue distinguishing isolated and final noon from baa-shaped letters. In handwriting the bowl is sometimes drawn shallow — but as long as it goes below the line, readers will identify it correctly. The single dot above is reliable; in fast Ruq'ah it may shift slightly but rarely vanishes entirely.