U+10840 "𐡀" Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
𐡀
U+10840 "𐡀" Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph is the first letter of the Imperial Aramaic script, an ancient abjad used primarily from the 7th century BCE to the 3rd century CE for administrative and religious texts across the Achaemenid Persian Empire. As the initial character of the alphabet, it denotes the glottal stop consonant sound and is represented by a glyph that resembles a stylized "X" or angled cross, derived from earlier Phoenician forms. This letter holds historical significance because Imperial Aramaic served as a lingua franca for much of the Near East, influencing later scripts including Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, making U+10840 a key piece for encoding ancient Semitic writing systems in digital text.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+10840 |
| Version Added | 5.2 |
| Name | Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph |
| Block | Imperial Aramaic |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Right To Left |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | 𐡀 |
| HTML Hex Encoding | 𐡀 |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xF0 0x90 0xA1 0x80 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xD802 0xDC40 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00010840 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ud802\udc40 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFD Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKD Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Script | Imperial Aramaic |
| Script Extensions | Imperial Aramaic |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | OLetter |