The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Even until the sixteenth century, it was used to write some texts in Spanish. After the Latin script, it is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world.

The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, so most Arabic alphabets are classified as abjads.

The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʾān, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write languages of many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols, with some versions, such as Kurdish being abugidas or true alphabets. (See section Languages written with the Arabic script below.) It is also the basis for a rich tradition of Arabic calligraphy.

The Arabic script has the ISO 15924 codes Arab and 160.

The Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Kurdish, Malay, and Urdu, which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive (the [p] sound), so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas Indonesian languages tend to imitate those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.