U+1366 "፦" Ethiopic Preface Colon Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+1366 "፦" Ethiopic Preface Colon is a punctuation mark used in the Geʽez script, primarily for classical Ethiopic and modern Amharic and Tigrinya texts, where it functions as a stylistic colon that introduces a preface, explanation, or quotation, often appearing after headings or titles to signal the start of a new section or a shift in discourse. Its design consists of two vertically aligned dots, similar to the standard colon, but it is distinguished from the regular Ethiopic colon (U+1365) by its specific role in structuring formal or literary works, such as in religious manuscripts or historical chronicles. This character helps maintain the rich typographic tradition of the Ethiopic writing system, which dates back over a thousand years, and it is encoded in the Unicode Standard to support accurate representation and digital preservation of these languages.

General Properties

Code Point U+1366
Version Added 3.0
Name Ethiopic Preface Colon
Block Ethiopic
General Category Other Punctuation
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ፦
HTML Hex Encoding ፦
UTF-8 Encoding 0xE1 0x8D 0xA6
UTF-16 Encoding 0x1366
UTF-32 Encoding 0x00001366
C/C++/Java Escape \u1366

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 Ethiopic
Script Extensions Ethiopic
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Terminal Punctuation Yes
Vertical Orientation Rotated
Grapheme Base Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break Other
Word Break Other
Sentence Break Other