One letter. Two alphabets. Both readers.

Aravrit (עברית + عربية: ivrit folded into aravit) is a typeface by the Haifa type designer Liron Lavi Turkenich. Her city signs everything three times over, and she caught herself reading the Hebrew and skipping the Arabic. So she made a script where you can't skip either: every letter is Arabic on the upper half and Hebrew on the lower half.

She drew a hybrid for every possible pair, 638 letters in all, and released the face in 2012. It has since been set on street signs, in a TEDx talk, at the London Design Museum, the Jerusalem Light Festival, SXSW and Expo 2020 Dubai, and on prints, ceramics and jewellery from her own studio.

Aravrit itself is her hand-drawn work and isn't a free webfont, so nothing on this page is the real typeface: it is Hebrabic's homage, re-enacted live with the site's own Arabic and Hebrew fonts, cut at the fold, letter by letter. Everything you can read here, she figured out first.

In the late 1800s the French ophthalmologist Louis Émile Javal noticed that readers of Latin script recognise words from the top halves of the letters alone: the bottoms are mostly padding. Turkenich ran the same test on her two scripts and found they disagree about which half matters. Hebrew keeps its identity downstairs; Arabic keeps its dots, teeth and tall strokes upstairs. Opposite halves, one letter. Try covering each one yourself:

Type any pair, then move the fold. Higher shows more Arabic, lower more Hebrew: the point is to find the cut where both readers are still happy. When you like it, switch the whole site over and read the vocabulary, the roots and the alphabet this way.

Cognates are Aravrit's natural habitat: the same Semitic root usually means the same number of letters, so each cell is a whole hybrid. These are every true or shifted cognate in the word bank with matching lengths. Tap the meaning to read the family story.

Each Arabic letter over the Hebrew cousin it grew up with (the same pairings as the alphabet module). Where Hebrew merged two Arabic sounds into one letter, the cousin shows up twice.

This page is an independent tribute and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the designer. The typeface, the idea and the name Aravrit are hers; the prints and ceramics are the way to own a piece of it.