U+0BB7 "ஷ" Tamil Letter Ssa Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ஷ
U+0BB7 "ஷ" Tamil Letter Ssa is a distinct consonant in the Tamil script, primarily used to represent the voiceless retroflex fricative sound similar to the "sh" in English "shark." It is not a native Tamil phoneme but was introduced to write loanwords from Sanskrit, Hindi, and English, such as "ஷேர்" (share) or "விஷயம்" (subject). The character is part of the Tamil syllabary and is encoded in the Unicode Standard with the code point U+0BB7, allowing for consistent digital representation and rendering across platforms. When combined with a following vowel sign, it forms compound syllables like "ஷா" (U+0BB7 U+0BBE) for the long "ssa" sound.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0BB7 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Tamil Letter Ssa |
| Block | Tamil |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ஷ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ஷ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xAE 0xB7 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0BB7 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000BB7 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0bb7 |