U+A8C4 "꣄" Saurashtra Sign Virama Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
꣄
U+A8C4 "꣄" Saurashtra Sign Virama is a diacritical mark used in the Saurashtra script, an abugida historically employed for writing the Saurashtra language primarily in Tamil Nadu, India. Its function is to kill the inherent vowel of a consonant, thereby creating a conjunct or a consonant cluster by linking that consonant to a following consonant, or to indicate a final consonant without a vowel. This virama is visually distinct from similar marks in other scripts and plays a crucial role in accurately rendering Saurashtra text, which is now supported in digital environments through the Unicode standard for proper representation and typing.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+A8C4 |
| Version Added | 5.1 |
| Name | Saurashtra Sign Virama |
| Block | Saurashtra |
| General Category | Nonspacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Virama |
| Bidirectional Class | Nonspacing Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ꣄ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ꣄ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEA 0xA3 0x84 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xA8C4 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000A8C4 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ua8c4 |