U+30A9 "ォ" Katakana Letter Small O Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ォ
U+30A9 "ォ" Katakana Letter Small O is a typographic variant of the standard full-sized katakana character オ (o), used primarily in modern Japanese writing to indicate a prolonged or glided vowel sound within compound syllables. It is frequently employed as a subscript-like character to modify the pronunciation of preceding kanas, particularly in loanwords and onomatopoeia, such as in combinations like フォ (fo) or ヴォ (vo). Unlike its full-sized counterpart, this small form does not start a word or stand alone but instead serves as a phonetic marker to reflect foreign or non-standard sound patterns, a role shared with other small katakana characters in the Japanese writing system.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+30A9 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Katakana Letter Small O |
| Block | Katakana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ォ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ォ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x82 0xA9 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x30A9 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000030A9 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u30a9 |