U+1090E "𐤎" Phoenician Letter Semk Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

𐤎

U+1090E "𐤎" Phoenician Letter Semk is a character from the Phoenician alphabet, representing a letter that likely derived from an earlier pictograph of a fish spine or a support prop, and it corresponds to the Semitic letter samekh (𐤎). This letter held the phonetic value of /s/ and is considered the precursor to the Greek letter xi (Ξ) as well as the Latin letter X, though its exact form and sound have evolved across different ancient scripts. In the context of the Phoenician writing system, which was one of the first major alphabets to influence subsequent Mediterranean scripts, Semk was used primarily for recording trade and administrative texts, and its inclusion in the Unicode standard helps preserve this ancient script for modern digital communication and scholarly research.

General Properties

Code Point U+1090E
Version Added 5.0
Name Phoenician Letter Semk
Block Phoenician
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Right To Left

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding 𐤎
HTML Hex Encoding 𐤎
UTF-8 Encoding 0xF0 0x90 0xA4 0x8E
UTF-16 Encoding 0xD802 0xDD0E
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0001090E
C/C++/Java Escape \ud802\udd0e

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 Phoenician
Script Extensions Phoenician
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