Virama

Virama is a generic term for the diacritic character in many Brahmic scripts that is used to suppress an inherent vowel sound that occurs with every consonant character. The name stem from respect for Viramamuni, who deviced the shapes of modern day Indic character shapes suitable for printing. It is a Sanskrit word, and used in place of several script-specific terms for this diacritic, including halant in Devanagari script Hindi and hôshonto in the Bengali script.