Chandrabindu (meaning "moon-dot" in Sanskrit, alternatively spelled candrabindu, chandravindu, candravindu, or chôndrobindu) is a diacritic sign having the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (ँ), Bengali (ঁ), Gujarati (ઁ), Oriya (◌ଁ) and Telugu (ఁ) scripts.
It usually means that the previous vowel is nasalized. It is represented in Unicode as U+0901 in Devanagari, U+0981 in Bengali, U+0A81 in Gujarati, U+0B01 in Oriya, and U+0C01 in Telugu. There is also a general-purpose combining diacritical mark COMBINING CANDRABINDU code point U+0310 (◌̐), but this is intended for use with Latin letters in transliteration of Indic languages.
In Hindi, it is replaced in writing by anusvara when it is written above a consonant which carries a vowel symbol which extends above the top line.
In Classical Sanskrit it only seems to occur over a lla conjunct consonant, to show that it is pronounced as a nasalized double l, which occurs where -nl- have become assimilated in sandhi.
In Vedic Sanskrit it is used instead of anusvara to represent the sound called anunaasika when the next word starts with a vowel. It usually occurs where in earlier times a word ended in -ans.
Another symbol, identical to the chandrabindu, called the fermata, is an element of musical notation.
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