U+FB4C "בֿ" Hebrew Letter Bet with Rafe Unicode Character
U+FB4C "בֿ" Hebrew Letter Bet with Rafe is a precomposed typographic form used in certain Hebrew texts, most notably in Yiddish and some liturgical contexts, where a rafe diacritic (a small horizontal line above the letter) indicates that the Bet is pronounced as a fricative /v/ rather than a plosive /b/ in environments where such softening is traditionally applied. This character belongs to the Alphabetic Presentation Forms block, designed to supply ligatures and variant glyphs for historical and specialized typesetting, allowing the rafe to be encoded as a single unit rather than a base letter plus combining mark. Though less common in modern digital fonts, it serves to preserve accurate representation of scholarly or religious manuscripts where the rafe is integral to correct pronunciation and orthographic tradition.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+FB4C |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hebrew Letter Bet with Rafe |
| Block | Alphabetic Presentation Forms |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Right To Left |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ב" U+05D1 Hebrew Letter Bet "ֿ" U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | בֿ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | בֿ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEF 0xAD 0x8C |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xFB4C |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000FB4C |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ufb4c |