U+12B5 "ኵ" Ethiopic Syllable Kwe Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ኵ
U+12B5 "ኵ" Ethiopic Syllable Kwe is a symbol from the Ethiopic script, historically used for writing Ge'ez, Amharic, Tigrinya, and other languages of the Horn of Africa. It represents a specific syllable formed from the consonant "k" combined with the vowel "we" or "ü," depending on the orthographic tradition. This character is part of the unified Ethiopic block in Unicode, which encodes the abugida system where each character denotes a consonant-vowel pairing. In the Ge'ez script's classical vocalization, ኵ corresponds to the sound /kʷɨ/ or a similar labiovelar articulation, and it is still employed in modern liturgical and linguistic contexts to preserve the phonetic richness of these written languages.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+12B5 |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Ethiopic Syllable Kwe |
| Block | Ethiopic |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ኵ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ኵ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0x8A 0xB5 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x12B5 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000012B5 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u12b5 |