Meem

Meem is the 24th letter of the Arabic alphabet, representing the bilabial nasal consonant /m/. In Arabic, it is named mīm, and in transliteration it is commonly written as meem or meem. The letter is used across languages that employ the Arabic script, including Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, to form words and grammatical structures. It is also used in transliteration schemes to represent the sound /m/ in Latin script.

In written Arabic, meem has contextual forms depending on its position in a word: isolated م, initial مـ, medial ـمـ, and final ـم. Like other Arabic letters, it connects to adjacent letters within words, contributing to the script’s characteristic cursive flow.

In encoding and computing, the Arabic letter Meem is assigned the Unicode code point U+0645 and is part of the Arabic block in Unicode. It is one of the basic letters taught early in learning to read and write in languages that use the Arabic script.

As a component of many words, meem appears throughout languages that use the Arabic script, and its name is often used in discussions of the alphabet to refer to the sound /m/.