The Persian alphabet: 32 letters, four of them not in Arabic

The Persian alphabet has 32 letters, written right to left and joined together. It is the Arabic script with four extra letters for sounds Arabic does not have: پ p, چ ch, ژ zh and گ g. If you already read Arabic, you are most of the way there; if not, the system is regular and learnable in a couple of weeks. This guide gives you every letter, the rules that trip beginners up and real words to practise on. When you are ready, try the free Persian level test.

Updated November 12, 2026 · 7 min read

Where the Persian alphabet is used

In Iran, the Constitution makes Persian the official language and script: Article 15 says official documents, correspondence, official texts and schoolbooks must be in it, while regional and ethnic languages may be used in the press and media and their literature taught at school alongside Persian. Article 16 adds that Arabic is taught from the end of elementary school to the end of high school — one reason the two scripts stay so close.

The Unicode Standard lists Persian among the languages that extended the Arabic script, together with Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Uyghur. So the letters you learn here carry over: see our guides to the Arabic alphabet and the Urdu alphabet, and the level tests in Urdu, Pashto and Sorani Kurdish.

Four rules before the letters

• Right to left. Words and lines run from right to left; numbers inside a line still read left to right.
• Joined, even in print. Most letters connect to the next one, so a letter's shape changes a little at the start, middle or end of a word. The core shape stays recognisable.
• Seven letters never join forward. ا د ذ ر ز ژ و connect to the letter before them but never to the one after, so a small gap follows them. Unicode's joining data lists exactly these as right-joining.
• Short vowels are usually not written. Persian has the vowels a, e and o that are mostly left out, and â, i and u that are written with ا, ی and و. Beginners' books add the small vowel marks; newspapers and signs do not.

All 32 letters

The order follows Wiktionary's list of Persian letters. The Latin values follow Wiktionary's romanisation of Iranian Persian; the sounds are our rough guide for English speakers, not a phonetics lesson. No in the last column marks the letters that never join the next one.

The four letters Arabic does not have

Each one is an Arabic letter with more dots or an extra stroke. That makes them easy to spot — and easy to confuse with their parents at first.

Wiktionary's entry for پ even records an old name for it, bâ-ye fârsi — "the Persian b".

Several letters, one sound

Persian took many words from Arabic and kept their spelling, but not their pronunciation. So Persian has three letters for s, four for z, two for t and two for h. Wiktionary's pronunciations show it plainly:

• s: ث in ثابت sâbet (constant), ص in صبح sobh (morning), س in سبز sabz (green).
• z: ذ in ذرت zorrat (maize), ظ in ظهر zohr (noon), ض in ضعیف za'if (weak), ز in زبان zabân (tongue, language).
• t: ط in طلا talâ (gold) and ت in تو to (you, informal).
• h: ح in حرف harf (letter) and ه in هفت haft (seven).

Small differences from Arabic writing

• ی (ye) has no dots at the end of a word, and two dots below at the start or in the middle. Unicode encodes it as its own character, Farsi yeh; Arabic's ي keeps its dots everywhere. On a keyboard set to Arabic you may type the wrong one — a search for a Persian word can then fail.
• Digits have their own set: Unicode encodes the extended Arabic-Indic digits used for Persian, Sindhi and Urdu separately from the Arabic ones, and Persian ۴ ۵ ۶ are shaped differently from Urdu's.
• Quotation marks are rounded « », and the comma is the Arabic-script ، .

The invisible half-space

Persian uses a character you cannot see: the zero width non-joiner, a half-space that stops two letters from joining without putting a full space between them. The plural ending ها -hâ is written this way: کتاب‌ها ketâb-hâ (books), آب‌ها âb-hâ (waters) — see the plural in Wiktionary's entry for کتاب. The Unicode Standard names the Persian plural suffix as an example and warns that removing the non-joiner gives a different meaning or meaningless text.

First words to read

Short vowels are missing in the spelling, so read the Persian first, then check your guess against the Latin. All words and meanings are from Wiktionary.

A two-week plan

1. Days 1–3: the letters that never join forward (ا د ذ ر ز ژ و), then ب پ ت ث — one skeleton, different dots.
2. Days 4–6: ج چ ح خ and س ش ص ض; write each in its joined forms.
3. Days 7–9: the rest of the alphabet; read the word table above aloud.
4. Days 10–14: read short vowelled texts, and learn ten new words a day with their spelling. Then take the Persian level test to see where you stand.

Keep learning

• The Arabic alphabet — the 28 letters Persian builds on
• The Urdu alphabet — the same script stretched further, with Nastaliq
• The Azerbaijani alphabet — a Turkic neighbour, now in Latin letters
• The Pashto alphabet and the Sorani Kurdish alphabet — two more Iranian languages in the same script, each with its own letters
• The Hebrew alphabet and Devanagari for Hindi
• Level tests: Persian, Arabic, Azerbaijani or all 36 languages
• All guides · Plans and prices