It must be understood that there are four types of connecting characters for each letter: Freestanding, Initial, Medial, and Final. There is no capitalization in Persian: there are no upper or lower cases. However, when characters are within a word, some have to be attached to their preceding and/or following characters, while others do not connect together, according to where they appear in a word.

In the following list, click on the transcription to see a pop up window with larger examples of each character set, and then click on the Persian words to hear vocabulary examples for Initial, Medial, Final, and Freestanding placements (indicated in red):

There are seven characters which can be connected to a preceding character, but do not connect to a following character (see below). These characters are:

ا د ذ ر ز ژ و

In addition:

• The only time that the characters are used in freestanding forms is in an alphabet chart, in cross-word puzzles, car license plates, etc.
• The initial and medial ن nun “n” and ی ye “i/y” are the same as ت , پ , ب , and ث in shape and the only difference is the number of the dots for each character: nun takes one dot at the top and ye takes two dots underneath it.
• The combination of ل and الف is always the ligature لا , not لـا.