U+0103 "ă" Latin Small Letter A with Breve Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ă
U+0103 "ă" Latin Small Letter A with Breve is a distinctive letter used primarily in the Romanian and Vietnamese alphabets, where it represents a specific vowel sound distinct from the plain letter "a." In Romanian, it denotes the mid-central vowel sound /ə/, as heard in the English word "about," while in Vietnamese, it indicates a short "a" sound combined with a specific tonal contour depending on the diacritics added above the breve. This character is formed by placing a breve, a diacritical mark shaped like a short curved line, above the lowercase letter "a," and it plays a crucial role in the orthography of these languages for distinguishing meaning and pronunciation.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0103 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Latin Small Letter A with Breve |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Latin Small Letter A Breve |
| Block | Latin Extended-A |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "a" U+0061 Latin Small Letter A "̆" U+0306 Combining Breve |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ă |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ă |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC4 0x83 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0103 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000103 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0103 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Lowercase | Yes |
| Simple Uppercase Code Point | "Ă" U+0102 Latin Capital Letter A with Breve |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Ă" U+0102 Latin Capital Letter A with Breve |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Ă" U+0102 Latin Capital Letter A with Breve |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Ă" U+0102 Latin Capital Letter A with Breve |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Titlecased | Yes |
| Changes When Uppercased | Yes |
| Script | Latin |
| Script Extensions | Latin |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | Lower |