U+A85D "ꡝ" Phags-Pa Letter A Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ꡝ
U+A85D "ꡝ" Phags-Pa Letter A is a glyph from the Phags-Pa script, an alphabet created in the 13th century during the Yuan Dynasty under the direction of the Tibetan monk Drogön Chögyal Phagpa to uniformly write Chinese, Mongolian, and other languages of the Mongol Empire. This specific character represents the vowel sound "a" and is distinguished by its tail-like vertical stroke descending from a horizontal top line, reflecting the script's derivation from Tibetan writing. The Phags-Pa script, though eventually falling out of common use, remains historically significant for its role in linguistic unification and is now primarily studied by scholars of historical scripts and encoded in Unicode for digital preservation.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+A85D |
| Version Added | 5.0 |
| Name | Phags-Pa Letter A |
| Block | Phags-pa |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ꡝ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ꡝ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEA 0xA1 0x9D |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xA85D |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000A85D |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ua85d |