U+12BB "ኻ" Ethiopic Syllable Kxaa Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ኻ
U+12BB "ኻ" Ethiopic Syllable Kxaa is a glyph from the Geʽez script, used historically for liturgical and classical Ethiopic languages such as Geʽez and more recently in modern Amharic and Tigrinya. This character represents a syllable formed with the consonant “ḫ” (a voiceless velar fricative, similar to the “ch” in Scottish “loch”) combined with the vowel “aa,” which is the first order vowel in the Ethiopic syllabary, pronounced as a long open back vowel. It is part of the “ḫa” family of characters, which is used in traditional writing systems of the Horn of Africa, particularly in religious texts and scholarly works, and it contributes to the rich phonetic diversity of the script.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+12BB |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Ethiopic Syllable Kxaa |
| Block | Ethiopic |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ኻ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ኻ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0x8A 0xBB |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x12BB |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000012BB |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u12bb |