U+305C "ぜ" Hiragana Letter Ze Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ぜ
U+305C "ぜ" Hiragana Letter Ze is a character in the Japanese syllabary that represents the sound "ze," formed by adding a dakuten (voicing mark) to the hiragana character せ (se). It is part of the hiragana block in Unicode, which is used prominently in modern Japanese writing for native words, grammatical particles, and verb endings. This character corresponds to the katakana equivalent ゼ (U+30BC) and is historically derived from the cursive style of the Chinese character 世. In everyday use, ぜ appears in words like ぜんぶ (zenbu, meaning "all") and かぜ (kaze, meaning "wind" or "cold"), and it also frequently serves as a casual sentence-ending particle to assert emphasis or familiarity in informal speech.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+305C |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hiragana Letter Ze |
| Block | Hiragana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "せ" U+305B Hiragana Letter Se "゙" U+3099 Combining Katakana-Hiragana Voiced Sound Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ぜ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ぜ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x81 0x9C |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x305C |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000305C |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u305c |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Ideographic |
| East Asian Width | Wide |
| Script | Hiragana |
| Script Extensions | Hiragana |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Upright |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Other |
| Sentence Break | OLetter |