U+FD31 "ﴱ" Arabic Ligature Seen with Heh Initial Form Unicode Character

U+FD31 "ﴱ" Arabic Ligature Seen with Heh Initial Form is a typographic ligature used in the Arabic script, specifically designed to represent the combination of the letters Seen (س) and Heh (ه) when they appear in their initial forms at the beginning of a word. This character is part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which contains precomposed ligatures intended for compatibility with older text rendering systems. It serves to visually bind the two letters into a single connected shape, reflecting the cursive nature of Arabic calligraphy where certain letter pairs merge seamlessly. While modern Unicode encoding typically prefers using the individual character sequence of Seen and Heh with proper shaping logic, U+FD31 remains available for specialized use in legacy documents or display contexts where the exact ligature form is required.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FD31
Version Added	1.1
Name	Arabic Ligature Seen with Heh Initial Form
Block	Arabic Presentation Forms-A
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Arabic Letter
Decomposition Type	Initial
Decomposition Mapping	"س" U+0633 Arabic Letter Seen "ه" U+0647 Arabic Letter Heh

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ﴱ
HTML Hex Encoding	ﴱ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xB4 0xB1
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFD31
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FD31
C/C++/Java Escape	\ufd31

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"س" U+0633 Arabic Letter Seen "ه" U+0647 Arabic Letter Heh
NFKC Simple Casefold	"س" U+0633 Arabic Letter Seen "ه" U+0647 Arabic Letter Heh
Script	Arabic
Script Extensions	Arabic
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
ID Start	Yes
XID Start	Yes
ID Continue	Yes
XID Continue	Yes
Alphabetic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break	OLetter