The Arabic script is a writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users (after the Latin and Chinese scripts).The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

Many scripts in Unicode, including Arabic and Devanāgarī, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms.. In English, the common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, Latin for and) were combined. The rules governing ligature formation in Arabic …