Avagraha (ऽ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ (a) in many Indian languages like Sanskrit as shown below.
It is usually transliterated with an apostrophe in Roman script and, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् Śivo'ham (Śivaḥ aham), which is a sandhi of (शिवः + अहम्) ‘I am Shiva’.
The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ!
[citation needed] In the case of Hindi, the character is also sometimes used as a symbol to denote long or heavy syllables, in metrical poetry.
The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Brahmic scripts that use it.