Chandrabindu
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Chandrabindu (meaning "moon-dot" in Sanskrit, alternatively spelled candrabindu, chandravindu, candravindu, or chôndrobindu) is a diacritic sign having the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (ँ), Bengali (ঁ), Gujarati (ઁ), Oriya (ଁ), Telugu (ఁ), and Javanese (ꦀ) scripts.
It usually means that the previous vowel is nasalized. It is represented in Unicode as U+0901 in Devanagari, U+0981 in Bengali, U+0A81 in Gujarati, U+0B01 in Oriya, U+0C01 in Telugu and U+A980 in Javanese. There is also a general-purpose combining diacritical mark COMBINING CANDRABINDU code point U+0310 (◌̐), but this is intended for use with Latin letters in transliteration of Indic languages.
In Hindi, it is replaced in writing by anusvara when it is written above a consonant which carries a vowel symbol which extends above the top line.
In Classical Sanskrit it only seems to occur over a lla conjunct consonant, to show that it is pronounced as a nasalized double l, which occurs where -nl- have become assimilated in sandhi.
In Vedic Sanskrit it is used instead of anusvara to represent the sound called anunaasika when the next word starts with a vowel. It usually occurs where in earlier times a word ended in -ans.
Not to be confused with
Another symbol, called the fermata, similar in appearance to an upside-down chandrabindu, is an element of musical notation.