Browse Dictionary A–Z
All 44 letters of the Pashto alphabet covering 116,255 headwords. Select any letter to view its complete alphabetical index.
The 44 Pashto Letters (د پښتو ٤٤ توري)
RTL Alphabetical OrderUnique Pashto Consonants
Pashto features consonants not found in Persian or standard Arabic. Each letter represents a distinct phoneme:
Pashto Phonetic Inventory & Alphabetical Classification (د پښتو غږیز نظام)
The Pashto alphabet consists of 44 standard letters derived from the Perso-Arabic Naskh script, augmented with distinctive modified graphemes to represent phonemes unique to Eastern Iranian and Indo-Iranian convergence:
Representing apical and subapical retroflex consonants produced with the tongue curled back against the hard palate: /ʈ/ (ټ), /ɖ/ (ډ), /ɭ̆/ (ړ), and the retroflex nasal /ɳ/ (ڼ). These sounds represent an ancient linguistic areal convergence in Eastern Iranian phonology.
Unique letters that undergo major dialectal shifts: څ represents alveolar affricate /ts/ in Southwestern (Kandahari) Pashto or /s/ in Northeastern (Peshawari) Pashto; ځ represents voiced affricate /dz/ in Kandahar or voiced fricative /z/ in Peshawar. The letter ښ is pronounced /ʂ/ (Kandahar) or /x/ (Peshawar), while ږ is pronounced /ʐ/ (Kandahar) or /ɡ/ (Peshawar).
Our dictionary follows the authoritative academic collation order established by the Kabul Orthographic Conference and Peshawar Pashto Academy. Headwords are indexed strictly by their primary consonantal skeleton, while secondary vocalization and diacritical marks resolve homographs systematically.
All 44 letters are encoded with universal UTF-8 compliance, supporting zero-width non-joiners (ZWNJ) for compound lexemes, plural suffixes, and prefixal verbal particles (e.g., 'نه' and 'بې'), ensuring seamless multi-device rendering and search accuracy.
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