العربية

Diwani alphabet and practice sheets

The Diwani alphabet: every letter below, each in the shapes it takes alone, at the start, in the middle and at the end of a word. Trace any letter on screen, or print its free A4 practice sheet, or save it as a PDF from your browser’s print window.

Learn Diwani step by step: the 43-lesson path →

Watch the lesson films, in English and Arabic: level 1 is free →

Diwani was the chancery hand of the Ottoman court, used for decrees and letters of state, and it was meant to look ceremonial and to be hard to forge. Its letters lean, curve back on themselves and knot together, so a Diwani word is read as a shape before it is read as letters. Below is the whole alphabet in Diwani, each letter in the four shapes it takes — alone, opening a word, inside a word and closing it — set in TE Aldwawin by the calligrapher Tharwat Emara, a licensed face. Learn the single letters here before any joining: in Diwani the joins are where the difficulty lives, because each letter bends to meet the next. It is usually studied after Ruq'ah, whose short, quick letters it resembles in skeleton. Trace opens each letter in Diwani with a stroke like a reed pen’s, cut to the script's own pen angle: trace over it and the studio measures how much of the letter you covered; the printable sheet sets the Diwani model at the top of an A4 page with rows to trace over by hand.

Sentences from the master pieces

Once the letters hold, write whole sentences. These are the complete lines of our calligrapher's Thuluth master pieces, shortest first, set here in the TE Aldwawin typeface.

Trace opens each letter in Diwani with a stroke like a reed pen’s, cut to its pen angle and measured from the letters themselves: thick and thin come from the direction you pull, with a mouse, a finger or an iPad pen. There are no numbered strokes; the studio measures how much of the true letter you covered. · Diwani phrases to try · the history of Diwani · for teachers

Practice sheets in the other scripts: Naskh · Thuluth · Ruq'ah · Farsi (Nastaliq)

Diwani calligraphy art for sale