U+12D6 "ዖ" Ethiopic Syllable Pharyngeal O Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ዖ
U+12D6 "ዖ" Ethiopic Syllable Pharyngeal O is a symbol from the Geʽez script used for liturgical and modern languages in the Horn of Africa, including Amharic and Tigrinya. It represents the syllable "ʕo," where the initial consonant is a voiced pharyngeal fricative sound, indicated by the base character "ዐ" (ʕä) combined with the vowel diacritic for "o." This character is part of the larger Ethiopic syllabary that organizes consonants in series and uses modifications to the base letter shape to denote different vowels. In digital text, it is encoded in the Unicode Standard under the Ethiopic block, allowing for consistent representation across platforms and supporting the preservation of languages that use this ancient writing system.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+12D6 |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Ethiopic Syllable Pharyngeal O |
| Block | Ethiopic |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ዖ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ዖ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0x8B 0x96 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x12D6 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000012D6 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u12d6 |