Ura is the first of the thirty-five letters of the Gurmukhi painti and the first of its three vowel bearers, the others being Aira and Iri. It is written as a single stroke dropped from the headline and turned to the left at the foot, a shape shared with no other letter in the script. Gurmukhi is an abugida rather than an alphabet: every consonant sign carries an inherent short a, and the other vowels are written as marks placed above, below, before or after that consonant. The system leaves one gap. A syllable that begins with a vowel has no consonant for the mark to sit on, and the three bearers exist to fill it. They are silent frames, and the vowel sign written on a bearer supplies the whole of the sound.
The ten vowels of Gurmukhi are divided among the three according to where in the mouth they are made. Ura takes the rounded back vowels: u with the aunkar written beneath it, the long oo with the doubled form of the same mark, and o with the hora written above. Aira takes a, the long aa, ai and au. Iri takes i, the long ee and e. A learner therefore acquires two things at once, the vowel marks themselves and the bearer each one belongs to, and a vowel written on the wrong bearer is a spelling mistake and not an alternative. Ura standing bare, with no vowel mark at all, does not occur, because a bearer with nothing to bear has nothing to say.