U+02BE "ʾ" Modifier Letter Right Half Ring Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

ʾ

U+02BE "ʾ" Modifier Letter Right Half Ring is a diacritical mark primarily used in linguistic transcription systems, most famously in the romanization of Arabic and Semitic languages to represent the glottal stop or the Arabic letter hamza (ء). It appears as a small raised half ring shaped like a turned comma or apostrophe, similar in form to a left single quotation mark, and is distinct from the similar but leftward facing modifier letter left half ring (U+02BF). When applied, it modifies the preceding letter to indicate a specific phonetic quality, and its careful encoding as a separate character allows for consistent typesetting and digital representation in scholarly texts, linguistic databases, and transliteration standards like the Library of Congress or ISO systems.

General Properties

Code Point U+02BE
Version Added 1.1
Name Modifier Letter Right Half Ring
Block Spacing Modifier Letters
General Category Modifier Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ʾ
HTML Hex Encoding ʾ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xCA 0xBE
UTF-16 Encoding 0x02BE
UTF-32 Encoding 0x000002BE
C/C++/Java Escape \u02be

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value NaN
Line Break Alphabetic
Case Ignorable Yes
Script Common
Script Extensions Common
Indic Syllabic Category Other
ID Start Yes
XID Start Yes
ID Continue Yes
XID Continue Yes
Diacritic Yes
Alphabetic Yes
Vertical Orientation Rotated
Grapheme Base Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break Other
Word Break Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break OLetter