virama
विराम viramaThe mark that cancels the inherent vowel of a consonant in devanagari and its sister scripts, so that the akshara stands as a bare varna.
Where this term appears
- The Branching Hand Treatise
And when you need a bare consonant with no vowel at all, you add a small stroke called the virama or halant , whose only job is to switch off the inherent a .