U+0623 "أ" Arabic Letter Alef with Hamza Above Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
أ
U+0623 "أ" Arabic Letter Alef with Hamza Above is a specific glyph used in the Arabic script, representing a glottal stop that is often the initial sound in words beginning with a vowel. This character is formed by combining the base letter alef, which indicates a long vowel or a carrier for hamza, with a small hamza diacritic placed above it to mark the glottal stop articulation. It is a standard character in the Arabic alphabet used in languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and it appears in common words like "أم" meaning mother and "أكل" meaning eat.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0623 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Arabic Letter Alef with Hamza Above |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Arabic Letter Hamzah on Alef |
| Block | Arabic |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Arabic Letter |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ا" U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef "ٔ" U+0654 Arabic Hamza Above |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | أ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | أ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xD8 0xA3 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0623 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000623 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0623 |