virama

Virama is a diacritic used in many Indic scripts to suppress the inherent vowel after a consonant, turning a syllable that would be read as something like "ka" into a bare consonant "k." The mark is essential for forming consonant clusters (conjuncts) and for spelling consonants without a following vowel. In Devanagari, it is called virama and also known as halant; the sign is placed after the consonant as a short vertical stroke (U+094D). In Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, and other Brahmi-derived scripts, similar signs exist, often with local names such as hasanta in Bengali or pulli in Tamil; the general function remains the same: to cancel the inherent vowel.

When two or more consonants are combined with virama signs, they form conjunct consonants; for example, in Devanagari, the sequence क् + त can render as a ligature "क्त" representing "kta." The use of virama is also necessary to write consonants that do not require a vowel at the end of a syllable, as in many loanwords and Sanskrit transliterations.

Unicode and typography: Each script encodes its own virama in its script block (for Devanagari, U+094D; Bengali U+09CD; Tamil-coded as a Tamil Sign Virama). In rendering, font support allows the virama to join adjacent consonants into ligatures, or to appear as a standalone suppression sign.

History: The virama originated in Brahmi scripts as a way to indicate schwa suppression or cancellation of the inherent vowel, shaping how consonants combine into syllabic clusters in Indic writing systems.