started habitually using to spell . However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic is added on top of the to indicate the pronunciation. In the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription, God is referred to by the term , that is, alif-lam-alif-lam-ha. This presumably indicates Al-'ilāh = "the god", without alif for ā. Many Arabic type fonts feature special ligatures for Allah. Since Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Koran only, rendering + + as the previous ligature is considered faulty which is the case with most common Arabic typefaces. Unicode Unicode has a code point reserved for , = U+FDF2, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for "compatibility with some older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly"; this is discouraged for new text. Instead, the word should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will render the desired ligature. The calligraphic variant of the word used as the emblem of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at code point U+262B (☫). See also Abdullah (name) Allah as a lunar deity Emblem of Iran Ismul Azam Names of God—Kalsang Bhutia, Gloria Lotha, Marco Sampaolo, Matt StefonTesc, Noah Tesch and Adam Zeidan Citations General and cited references The Unicode Consortium, Unicode Standard 5.0, Addison-Wesley, 2006, , About the Unicode Standard Version 5.0 Book Further reading Online Allah Qur'ān, in Encyclopædia Britannica Online, by Asma Afsaruddin, Brian Duignan, Thinley External links Names of Allah with Meaning on Website, Flash, and Mobile Phone Software Concept of God (Allah) in Islam The Concept of Allāh According to the Qur'an by Abdul Mannan Omar Allah, the Unique Name of God Typography Arabic Fonts and Mac OS X Programs for Arabic in Mac OS X Arabian deities Arabian gods Islamic terminology Middle Eastern gods Names of God