Marathi typography comes with its own vocabulary, and a lot of it gets thrown around without explanation — in font download pages, in typing tutorials, in conversion tool descriptions. This glossary defines the terms you're most likely to encounter, in plain language, with links to the relevant tools and guides where it helps to go deeper.
Script & Character Basics
Devanagari — The writing system used for Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali, and several other Indian languages. "Devanagari" refers to the script itself, not any one language — it's the shared alphabet, not the words.
Glyph — The specific visual shape a font uses to draw a character. The underlying character stays the same, but its glyph — how it actually looks — changes from font to font. This is why the same Marathi word looks completely different in Modak versus Noto Sans Devanagari, even though it's the exact same text.
Matra — A vowel sign attached to a consonant, such as ा, ि, ी, ु, ू, े, or ो, that changes the vowel sound of that consonant. Matras are one of the two biggest sources of typing complexity in Devanagari (the other being conjuncts).
Conjunct consonant — A compound character formed when two or more consonants combine without a vowel between them, such as क्ष (ksh) or ज्ञ (gy). Conjuncts are visually distinct from their component consonants typed separately.
Halant (्) — The small diagonal mark that suppresses a consonant's default vowel sound, used to build conjunct consonants and to end a word on a bare consonant sound.
Encoding & Fonts
Unicode — The modern, universal character-encoding standard that lets Devanagari text display correctly on any website, app, or device, regardless of which font is installed. This is what makes Marathi text portable and searchable everywhere today. See our Devanagari fonts guide for more.
Kruti Dev — A widely used legacy, pre-Unicode Devanagari font system that maps Devanagari-like glyphs onto ordinary Latin keyboard keys, rather than using proper Unicode character codes. Text typed in Kruti Dev only displays correctly with that exact font installed — everywhere else it shows as broken Latin characters. Convert it with our Kruti Dev to Unicode Converter.
Shree Lipi / DevLys — Other legacy, pre-Unicode Devanagari font systems, similar in concept to Kruti Dev but using different internal character mappings, meaning they aren't interchangeable with each other or with Kruti Dev.
Google Fonts — A free, open library of web fonts, including a large set of Devanagari fonts, almost all released under the SIL Open Font License. See our font licensing guide for what that license actually allows.
Typing & Conversion
Transliteration — Converting text from one script to another based on how it sounds, without changing its meaning. Typing "namaskaar" and getting "नमस्कार" is transliteration, not translation. See our Unicode Converter.
Romanization — Transliteration specifically into the Roman/Latin alphabet — essentially another word for what our Marathi to English converter does.
Phonetic keyboard layout — A Devanagari keyboard layout where keys roughly correspond to English letter sounds, making it easier for English-literate typists to learn quickly.
Inscript — A fixed, standardized Devanagari keyboard layout used across Indian government systems, where each key maps to a specific Devanagari character regardless of English spelling — a different learning curve than phonetic typing.
Numerals
Devanagari numerals — The native numeral set for the Devanagari script (०-९), distinct from standard Arabic numerals (0-9), still used in some formal, traditional, and decorative Marathi contexts. See our full Devanagari numerals guide and numeral converter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does old Marathi text sometimes show as broken symbols?
That almost always means the text was typed in a legacy, pre-Unicode font like Kruti Dev or Shree Lipi rather than Unicode, and the device displaying it doesn't have that exact legacy font installed. Converting the text to Unicode with our Kruti Dev converter fixes this permanently.
What's the difference between a font and Unicode?
Unicode defines which character is being represented (the underlying data). A font defines what that character visually looks like (the glyph). The same Unicode Devanagari text can be displayed in dozens of different fonts — try it yourself in our font generator — without changing the underlying text at all.