What direction does Arabic read?

Arabic reads Right-to-left (RTL).

What direction does Cyrillic read?

Cyrillic reads Left-to-right (LTR).

How many characters does Arabic have?

Arabic has 1,413 characters in Unicode.

How many characters does Cyrillic have?

Cyrillic has 508 characters in Unicode.

Arabic vs Cyrillic

Writing system comparison · ISO Arab vs ISO Cyrl

Arabic is a Living Right-to-left script from Middle Eastern (1,413 Unicode characters) used by 60 languages. Cyrillic is a Living Left-to-right script from European (508 Unicode characters) used by 61 languages. A key difference is reading direction: Arabic reads Right-to-left, while Cyrillic reads Left-to-right. 6 languages are written in both scripts.

Arabic

مرحبا بالعالم

العربية

Cyrillic

Привет мир

Кириллица

Side-by-Side Comparison

Attribute	Arabic	Cyrillic
ISO Code	Arab	Cyrl
Direction	Right-to-left	Left-to-right
Status	Living	Living
Region	Middle Eastern	European
Characters	1,413	508
Languages	60	61
Script Type	Abjad	Alphabet
Descended From	Nabataean	Greek
Total Speakers	~291M	~285.5M
Introduced	400 CE	940 CE
Unicode Ranges	U+0600–U+06FF U+0750–U+077F U+0870–U+089F U+08A0–U+08FF U+FB50–U+FDFF U+FE70–U+FEFC U+10E60–U+10E7E U+10EC2–U+10EFF U+1EE00–U+1EEF1	U+0400–U+0489 U+048A–U+052F U+1C80–U+1C8A U+1D2B–U+1D78 U+2DE0–U+2DFF U+A640–U+A69F U+FE2E–U+FE2F U+1E030–U+1E08F