Rasm

thumb|500px|Early written Arabic used only rasm (in black). Later Arabic added diacritics (examples in red) so that homographic consonants, for example these two letters , could be distinguished. Short vowels are indicated by harakat diacritics (examples in blue) which is used in the Qur'an but not in most written Arabic.

Rasm ( ) is an Arabic writing script often used in the early centuries of Classical Arabic literature (7th centuryearly 11th century AD). It is the same as today's Arabic script except for the difference that the Arabic diacritics are omitted. These diacritics include consonant pointing or (), and supplementary diacritics or (). The latter include the () short vowel marks—singular: (). As an example, in rasm, the two distinct letters are indistinguishable because is omitted, or letters similar in shape may also become indistinguishable if the diacritics are omitted. Rasm is also known as Arabic skeleton script. This concept is somewhat similar to scriptio continua in the Latin script, where all spaces and other punctuations is omitted. The rasm form was common for writing Arabic until the early 2nd millennium.