U+3094 "ゔ" Hiragana Letter Vu Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ゔ
U+3094 "ゔ" Hiragana Letter Vu is a relatively modern addition to the Japanese hiragana syllabary, created by combining the character for "u" (う) with a dakuten diacritic mark to represent the voiced bilabial sound /vu/ or /bɯ/. It is primarily used to transliterate foreign words, such as "ヴァイオリン" (vaiorin, violin), where it appears as the base hiragana form for the "vu" syllable, though in practice, katakana ヴ is far more common for loanwords. This character is rarely used in native Japanese writing and was introduced to standardize the representation of foreign sounds that do not naturally occur in traditional Japanese phonology.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+3094 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hiragana Letter Vu |
| Block | Hiragana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "う" U+3046 Hiragana Letter U "゙" U+3099 Combining Katakana-Hiragana Voiced Sound Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ゔ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ゔ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x82 0x94 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x3094 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00003094 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u3094 |
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 |