Akshara is the Sanskrit term for what can be roughly translated as a "letter" in an abugida script, and equivalently, since abugida symbols express syllables, "syllable". It derives its name from the fact that the first letter of this varnamala (alphabet) is 'a' and the last is 'ksha'. Combining these two characters, one gets the term akshara which is used to denote the all letters in entire varnamala.

There are two main kinds of letters in Indian abugidas, vowels and consonants. Vowels are ending sounds of any syllable. Consonants are starting sounds, and in most languages they will not occur without being followed by vowels. Similary in most Indian languages, vowels will not appear alone except at the beginning of the word. They will be preceded by consonants.

Aksharas in typical Indian language

• vowels: There
  
  
  
  are around 12 to 16 vowels in alphabet, at least half of them being longer sounds.
• Short letters(Hraswaksharas): consonant letters merged with shorter length vowels.
• Long letters(Dirgaksharas): consonant letters merged with longer length vowels.
• Stressed Ones(Dwitwaksharas): combined letters that are formed with more than one basic consonants and one vowel. The vowel is the last one in most languagles like sanskrit or telugu. But one consonant can be the last one in languages like hindi and tamil.

Aksharas is superset of varamala. For example, the word "Akshara" has three aksharas, 'a', 'ksha' and 'ra'.

• a - 'a' is a vowel in alphabet.
• ksha - 'ksh' is a consonant and 'a' is a vowel.
• ra - 'r' is a consonant and 'a' is a vowel.

See also

• Brahmi]
• Devanagari
• alphabet