Scholarly Name Reference
also written Rahu
The Seizer — the asura whose severed head, having drunk the amṛta, swallows the sun and moon to cause eclipses; reckoned among the nine grahas
Scholarly reference for Rāhu
राहु
The name in its original Devanagari form. राहु → Rāhu. Sanskrit Rāhu is written in Devanagari as राहु · IAST transliteration maps each Devanagari vowel and consonant to a Latin equivalent · Macrons mark long vowels (ā, ī, ū); dots beneath consonants mark retroflex articulation (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ)
RAHU
Stripped of its identity, the name was reduced to plain Latin letters. The original orthography — stress, length, breathing — was erased by systems that only understand A-Z.
Rāhu
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
rāhu.com → xn--rhu-1oa.com
The non-ASCII characters in Rāhu are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Rāhu. PUNICODEX does not claim this domain is available; always verify status with a registrar.
RAH-hoo · /ˈraː. hu/
Derived from restored orthography (classical Sanskrit / IAST).
How rahu becomes Rāhu
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | r | → | R | Same | Same |
| 02 | a | → | ā | Length | Macron: long /aː/ |
| 03 | h | → | h | Same | Same |
| 04 | u | → | u | Same | Short /u/ |
Why Rāhu is classified as Tier-1
The Sanskrit restoration राहु preserves at least one distinctive feature its ASCII form loses — a diacritic or a distinctive letter that marks the original phonology. This makes it a single-tier Tier-1 name.
See how Rāhu behaves in the PUNICODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
rahu
→
Rāhu