U+00A8 "¨" Diaeresis Unicode Character

U+00A8 "¨" Diaeresis is a spacing diacritical mark used in various writing systems to indicate that a vowel is to be pronounced separately from a preceding vowel, as in the English word "naïve" or the French "Noël," rather than as part of a digraph or diphthong. It is distinct from the similar looking umlaut, which indicates a sound change in Germanic languages, though the same glyph is often used for both purposes in digital typography. This character is a visible, standalone symbol that occupies its own horizontal space, unlike its combining counterpart (U+0308) which is placed directly over a letter. Its usage appears across many languages including French, Dutch, Greek, and Spanish, where it primarily serves to prevent vowel blending and clarify pronunciation.

General Properties

Code Point	U+00A8
Version Added	1.1
Name	Diaeresis
Unicode 1.0 Name	Spacing Diaeresis
Block	Latin-1 Supplement
General Category	Modifier Symbol
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Other Neutral
Decomposition Type	Compat
Decomposition Mapping	"SP" U+0020 Space "̈" U+0308 Combining Diaeresis

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	¨
HTML Hex Encoding	¨
UTF-8 Encoding	0xC2 0xA8
UTF-16 Encoding	0x00A8
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000000A8
C/C++/Java Escape	\u00a8

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic)
East Asian Width	Ambiguous
Case Ignorable	Yes
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̈" U+0308 Combining Diaeresis
NFKC Simple Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̈" U+0308 Combining Diaeresis
Script	Common
Script Extensions	Common
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Diacritic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Other