What is "shadda"

n. A diacritic ((lang und sc=Arab ـّ)) used in the Arabic script to indicate gemination of a consonant.

Shaddah ( "[sign of] emphasis", also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid "emphasis") is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, marking a long consonant ( geminate). It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthographies of languages like Latin, Italian, Swedish, and Ancient Greek, and is thus rendered in Latin script in most schemes of Arabic transliteration, e.g. = ' pomegranates'.

In shape, it is a small letter s(h)in, standing for shaddah. It was devised for poetry by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad in the eighth century, replacing an earlier dot.

General
Unicode

Name

Transliteration

0651

(consonant doubled)

When a shadda is used on a consonant which also takes a , it is written above the shaddah, while if it had a (a dash below the consonant indicating that it takes a short as its vowel), the kasrah is written between the consonant and the , under the shaddah, rather than in its normal place.

Consonant length in Arabic is contrastive: means 'he studied' while means 'he taught'; means 'a youth cried' while means 'a youth was made to cry'. A consonant may be long because of the form of the noun or verb; e.g., the causative form of the verb requires the 2nd consonant of the root to be long, as in above, or by assimilation of consonants, for example the of the Arabic definite article al- assimilates to all dental consonants, e.g. instead of , or through metathesis, the switching of sounds, for example 'less, fewer' (instead of * ), as compared to 'greater'.

A syllable closed by a long consonant is made a long syllable. This affects both stress and prosody. Stress falls on the first long syllable from the end of the word, hence (or, with : ) as opposed to , 'love, agape' as opposed to '(experiential) knowledge'. In Arabic verse, when scanning the meter, a syllable closed by a long consonant is counted as long, just like any other syllable closed by a consonant or a syllable ending in a long vowel: 'Will you not indeed praise...?' is scanned as : short, long, long, short, long, short.