U+31F9 "ㇹ" Katakana Letter Small Ho Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+31F9 "ㇹ" Katakana Letter Small Ho is a small form of the standard katakana character ホ (Ho), primarily used in the modern Japanese writing system to represent a specific phonetic nuance, particularly as part of the extended katakana set for writing foreign loanwords or Ainu language sounds. Unlike the full-sized ホ, which is used in normal syllables, the small-sized version denotes a shortened or clipped pronunciation, often appearing in combination with other characters to create sounds not native to Japanese, such as in the representation of the Ainu language where it indicates a final glottal or reduced vowel. This character is part of the Katakana phonetic extensions block in the Unicode standard and is visually distinct from its full-size counterpart due to its reduced scale.

General Properties

Code Point U+31F9
Version Added 3.2
Name Katakana Letter Small Ho
Block Katakana Phonetic Extensions
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ㇹ
HTML Hex Encoding ㇹ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xE3 0x87 0xB9
UTF-16 Encoding 0x31F9
UTF-32 Encoding 0x000031F9
C/C++/Java Escape \u31f9

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value NaN
Line Break Conditional Japanese Starter
East Asian Width Wide
Script Katakana
Script Extensions Katakana
Indic Syllabic Category Other
ID Start Yes
XID Start Yes
ID Continue Yes
XID Continue Yes
Alphabetic Yes
Vertical Orientation Transformed Upright
Grapheme Base Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break Other
Word Break Katakana
Sentence Break OLetter