---
title: "Coloring the Armenian alphabet — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations"
description: "All 39 Armenian letters as coloring pages, where the letter itself is the art. How Nur"
canonical: "https://www.artio.space/nur-alphabet-coloring"
---

# Coloring the Armenian alphabet — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations

Coloring the Armenian alphabet — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations

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The alphabet

## Thirty-nine letters, sixteen centuries

Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet around the year 405 with 36
letters. Over the centuries it grew to the 39 letters Armenian uses today, from
Ա to Ֆ .
It is one of the oldest alphabets still in daily use, and for many families in
the diaspora it is the piece of Armenia that lives closest to home: on a
grandmother's bookshelf, in a Saturday-school notebook, on the spine of a
storybook.

Ա Բ Գ Դ Ե

The idea

## The letter is the page

Most alphabet coloring books print a letter beside a picture: A, and then an
apple. Nuṛ does what Armenian scribes have done for about a thousand years and
makes the letter itself the picture. Each of the 39 pages is one large
letterform carrying its design inside the stroke, in the manner of
[zardagir, the Armenian
decorated-letter tradition](https://www.artio.space/nur-decorated-letters): a bird here, a vine there, a row of ornament
cells to fill one by one.

Two rules shape every page. The regions are big enough for small fingers, a
handful of generous shapes rather than a manuscript's dense interlace. And the
letter stays legible: however much decoration a glyph carries, a child coloring
Ա is still looking at
Ա , not at a puzzle that used to be one.

How it colors

## Tap a shape, watch it fill

Like every page in Nuṛ, the letters color by tap. Pick a crayon, tap a shape,
and the color spreads outward from your fingertip. Solid, Soft, Deep and
Glitter fills each behave differently; the Woven fill, which lays color in
like carpet thread, comes with Plus. A finished letter replays from blank to
done and can be saved to Photos or printed as clean line art to color again
at the kitchen table.

Free and Plus

## What is free, what opens with Plus

Your first Armenian letters are free, together with sample pages from the rest
of the book, and they are free for good rather than for a trial period. The
whole alphabet, all 39 letters, opens with Nuṛ Plus : $5.99 a
month or $35.99 a year, about half price annually, with Apple Family Sharing
included and no free trial.

Nuṛ is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. For a note when it
ships, write to
[info@artio.space](mailto:info@artio.space).
More about the app on the [Nuṛ page](https://www.artio.space/nur).