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The dagger alif ( ) or superscript alif is written as a short vertical stroke on top of an Arabic letter. It indicates a long sound where an alif is normally not written, e.g. or . The dagger alif occurs in only a few modern words, but these include some common ones. It is rarely written, however, even in fully vocalised texts, except in the Qur'an. As Wright notes "[alif] was at first more rarely marked than the other long vowels, and hence it happens that, at a later period, after the invention of the vowel-points, it was indicated in some very common words merely by a fatḥa [i.e. the dagger alif.]" Most keyboards do not have the dagger alif. The word () is usually produced automatically by entering ""; or in Arabic "ç ààÃÂ". The word consists of alif + ligature of doubled with a shadda and a dagger alif above .
There are two possible ways of representing the dagger alif in modern editions of Quran. In the editions printed in the Middle East, the dagger alif is written with fatḥah: . In the editions printed in Türkiye and South Asia (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), the dagger alif is written without fatḥah: .