U+044A "ъ" Cyrillic Small Letter Hard Sign Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ъ
U+044A "ъ" Cyrillic Small Letter Hard Sign is a letter in the Cyrillic script that originally represented a very short, ultra-short vowel sound known as the "jer" in Old Church Slavonic. In modern Russian, it has no phonetic value of its own but functions as a "hard sign" (твёрдый знак), indicating that the preceding consonant is not palatalized before a following vowel, typically in compound words or prefixes. In Bulgarian, however, it is a full-fledged vowel pronounced as a schwa or mid-central vowel sound /ɤ/. The uppercase counterpart is U+042A and the character is also present in other Cyrillic alphabets such as Rusyn and some East Slavic languages for historical or orthographic purposes, though its use is distinct among them.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+044A |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Cyrillic Small Letter Hard Sign |
| Block | Cyrillic |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ъ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ъ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xD1 0x8A |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x044A |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000044A |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u044a |
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 |
| East Asian Width | Ambiguous |
| Lowercase | Yes |
| Simple Uppercase Code Point | "Ъ" U+042A Cyrillic Capital Letter Hard Sign |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Ъ" U+042A Cyrillic Capital Letter Hard Sign |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Ъ" U+042A Cyrillic Capital Letter Hard Sign |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Ъ" U+042A Cyrillic Capital Letter Hard Sign |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Titlecased | Yes |
| Changes When Uppercased | Yes |
| Script | Cyrillic |
| Script Extensions | Cyrillic |
| 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 |