U+3091 "ゑ" Hiragana Letter We Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ゑ
U+3091 "ゑ" Hiragana Letter We is a now largely obsolete kana used in classical Japanese texts, representing a syllable historically pronounced as "we" that merged into the modern sounds "e" or "i" over time. It is a cursive-styled character derived from the Chinese character "恵," and it was once common in pre-modern writing, particularly in works like The Tale of Genji or old dictionaries, before falling out of regular use after the postwar spelling reforms. Today, it appears rarely, primarily in historical literature, linguistic studies, or for stylistic effect in creative works where an archaic flavor is desired.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+3091 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hiragana Letter We |
| Block | Hiragana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ゑ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ゑ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x82 0x91 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x3091 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00003091 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u3091 |