U+095B "ज़" Devanagari Letter Za Unicode Character
U+095B "ज़" Devanagari Letter Za is a character used in the Devanagari script, primarily to represent the voiced alveolar fricative sound /z/ in languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali when transcribing loanwords from Persian, Arabic, or English. It is a modified form of the standard Devanagari letter Ja (ज), distinguished by a dot (nukta) placed beneath it, which indicates a borrowed foreign sound. This character is essential for accurately rendering words like "ज़मीन" (zamin, meaning land or earth) and "जज़ीरा" (jazira, meaning peninsula), bridging phonetic gaps inherent to the original Devanagari consonant set. As part of the Unicode Standard, it ensures consistent digital representation and interchange across modern computing systems for South Asian languages.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+095B |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Devanagari Letter Za |
| Block | Devanagari |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ज" U+091C Devanagari Letter Ja "़" U+093C Devanagari Sign Nukta |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ज़ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ज़ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xA5 0x9B |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x095B |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000095B |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u095b |