Catch the words that slipped through
When a document is meant to be fully vocalised — a Quran transcription, a graded reader, a vowelled poem — a single word left bare is easy to miss and jarring to the reader. This checker scans the whole passage and boxes the words that carry too few diacritics, turning a tedious manual proofread into a glance.
Who needs full vocalisation?
Most everyday Arabic — newspapers, websites, adult novels, business correspondence — is written without tashkeel because fluent readers supply the vowels from context. Full vocalisation is expected in a narrower set of contexts:
- Quran and Quranic study materials — the standard mushaf is fully vocalised so that the text can be recited without ambiguity across all dialects and levels of Arabic proficiency.
- Children’s books and early readers — vowel marks help beginner readers decode words they have not yet memorised.
- Language learning materials — graded readers and textbooks for Arabic learners use tashkeel to show pronunciation explicitly.
- Classical poetry editions — metre (ʿarūḍ) depends on vowel quantity, so vowels must be marked for a reader to scan the verse correctly.
- Formal liturgical texts — devotional prayers, supplications (du’a’), and Islamic poetry are often printed with full harakat.
In all these contexts, a missed tashkeel on one word is a typographic and pedagogical error that this checker catches before the file goes to print or publication.
How it works
For every Arabic word the tool counts two things: the base consonant letters, and the combining tashkeel marks attached to them. Long-vowel alef forms (ا آ إ أ ى) are subtracted from the expected slots because they normally do not take their own short-vowel mark. It then computes a ratio:
ratio = marks / max(1, letters - alefForms)Fully vocalised words sit comfortably above 0.5 — roughly one mark for each consonant that can take one. Any word whose ratio falls below that threshold is highlighted in red. Punctuation, digits, and non-Arabic tokens are ignored so they cannot distort the result.
Typical workflow for a vocalised document editor
- Paste the draft passage into the checker.
- Scan the red-highlighted words — these are the likely gaps.
- Check each flagged word in your source editor and add the missing marks.
- Re-paste to confirm the highlights clear.
- For a long document, work section by section rather than pasting everything at once, so each pass covers a manageable chunk.
Because the check is statistical rather than grammatical, use it as a triage tool: it points your eye straight at the suspicious words, and you confirm each one. It pairs naturally with the Harakat Remover — strip a copy to see the consonantal skeleton, then compare against the vocalised original. For very short fragments the threshold can be touchy, so it shines most on full sentences and paragraphs where the pattern of marks is clear.