U+0D3B "഻" Malayalam Sign Vertical Bar Virama Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
഻
U+0D3B "഻" Malayalam Sign Vertical Bar Virama is a combining mark used in the Malayalam script to explicitly indicate a vowel cancellation, functioning as a virama that suppresses the inherent vowel of a consonant. Unlike the more common vowel sign virama found in many Indic scripts, this character is visually distinct as a vertical bar placed to the right of a base consonant, and it is employed in specialized orthographic contexts, particularly in historical or scholarly transcriptions of the Malayalam language. Its inclusion in Unicode helps preserve the accurate representation of traditional writing forms where this explicit virama was necessary to denote a consonant without any following vowel sound.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0D3B |
| Version Added | 10.0 |
| Name | Malayalam Sign Vertical Bar Virama |
| Block | Malayalam |
| General Category | Nonspacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Virama |
| Bidirectional Class | Nonspacing Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ഻ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ഻ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xB4 0xBB |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0D3B |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000D3B |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0d3b |