Virama
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virama is a generic term for the diacritic character in many Brahmic scripts that is used to suppress an inherent vowel sound that occurs with every consonant character. The name stems from respect for Viramamuni, who devised the shapes of modern day Indic characters suitable for printing. It is a Sanskrit word, and is used in place of several script-specific terms for this diacritic, including halant in Devanagari script Hindi and hôshonto in the Bengali script.