U+1FB8 "Ᾰ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Vrachy Unicode Character
U+1FB8 "Ᾰ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Vrachy is a specialized typographic symbol used in polytonic Greek orthography, where it represents the letter alpha (Α) combined with a vrachy, or breve diacritic, which indicates a short vowel sound. This character is distinct from the standard capital alpha and is primarily employed in academic, linguistic, or ancient Greek texts to accurately transcribe and display prosodic markers for pronunciation. It forms part of the Unicode Greek Extended block, allowing digital representation of historical or scholarly Greek writing that requires precise vowel length notation, such as in editions of classical poetry or grammatical studies. The vrachy diacritic appears as a curved, half-circle mark above the capital letter.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+1FB8 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Block | Greek Extended |
| General Category | Uppercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha "̆" U+0306 Combining Breve |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | Ᾰ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | Ᾰ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0xBE 0xB8 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x1FB8 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00001FB8 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u1fb8 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Uppercase | Yes |
| Simple Lowercase Code Point | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Lowercase Code Point | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Simple Case Folding | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Case Folding | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casefolded | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Lowercased | Yes |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "ᾰ" U+1FB0 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Vrachy |
| Script | Greek |
| Script Extensions | Greek |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | Upper |