U+0BCD "்" Tamil Sign Virama Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
்
U+0BCD "்" Tamil Sign Virama is a combining diacritical mark used in the Tamil script to indicate the suppression of the inherent vowel 'a' that is normally attached to a consonant, thereby creating a pure consonant or half-consonant form. It is visually represented as a small dot or superscript circle placed above or beside the base consonant character. This sign is essential for accurately writing Tamil, as it enables the representation of consonant clusters and dead consonants, which are common in the language's morphology and in borrowings from Sanskrit.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0BCD |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Tamil Sign Virama |
| Block | Tamil |
| General Category | Nonspacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Virama |
| Bidirectional Class | Nonspacing Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ் |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ் |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xAF 0x8D |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0BCD |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000BCD |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0bcd |