U+1F8B "ᾋ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Dasia and Varia and Prosgegrammeni Unicode Character
U+1F8B "ᾋ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Dasia and Varia and Prosgegrammeni is a rare and historically specific glyph used in ancient Greek polytonic orthography, representing a capital alpha with three combined diacritical marks: the dasia (rough breathing mark) indicating an initial /h/ sound, the varia (grave accent) denoting a lower pitch on the vowel, and the prosgegrammeni (subscript iota) indicating a long ē or long i sound in certain grammatical contexts. This character primarily appears in scholarly editions of classical texts, such as those from the Library of Alexandria, where precise accentuation and breathing were essential for pronunciation and meaning. Its inclusion in Unicode allows for accurate digital representation of ancient manuscripts, though it is rarely used in modern Greek writing, which has simplified to monotonic orthography.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+1F8B |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Dasia and Varia and Prosgegrammeni |
| Block | Greek Extended |
| General Category | Titlecase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "Ἃ" U+1F0B Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Dasia and Varia "ͅ" U+0345 Combining Greek Ypogegrammeni |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ᾋ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ᾋ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0xBE 0x8B |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x1F8B |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00001F8B |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u1f8b |