Abjad: Type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant

Even though vowels can be added in some abjads, they are not needed to write a word correctly. Abjad are commonly written from right to left, rather than left to right, like in other writing systems. Well-known examples of abjads are the English alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

Abjads are the first writing systems that were made to show only a word's pronunciation, instead of its meaning, unlike ideographs or ideograms, and were created before full alphabets like the Greek alphabet, which have letters for both consonants and vowels.

The earliest known abjad in the world is the Phoenician alphabet. Since in Afro-Asiatic languages, the root meaning of a word is found in its consonants, abjads are widely used in those languages. There are also languages without consonant roots that use abjads, such as Persian and Urdu, both of which use the Arabic alphabet.

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