U+1FBF "᾿" Greek Psili Unicode Character

U+1FBF "᾿" Greek Psili is a historic diacritical mark used in ancient and polytonic Greek writing, where it originally signified a "smooth" or "lenis" breathing, indicating that a vowel or rho beginning a word should be pronounced without an initial "h" sound, in contrast to the rough breathing mark used for aspiration. Visually resembling a small comma or apostrophe placed above the initial letter, this character is now primarily employed in scholarly texts, liturgical works, and modern typography that aims to faithfully reproduce classical Greek orthography, though it has largely fallen out of use in standard modern Greek.

General Properties

Code Point	U+1FBF
Version Added	1.1
Name	Greek Psili
Block	Greek Extended
General Category	Modifier Symbol
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Other Neutral
Decomposition Type	Compat
Decomposition Mapping	"SP" U+0020 Space "̓" U+0313 Combining Comma Above

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	᾿
HTML Hex Encoding	᾿
UTF-8 Encoding	0xE1 0xBE 0xBF
UTF-16 Encoding	0x1FBF
UTF-32 Encoding	0x00001FBF
C/C++/Java Escape	\u1fbf

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Case Ignorable	Yes
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̓" U+0313 Combining Comma Above
NFKC Simple Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̓" U+0313 Combining Comma Above
Script	Greek
Script Extensions	Greek
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Diacritic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Other