U+FE8B "ﺋ" Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above Initial Form Unicode Character

U+FE8B "ﺋ" Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above Initial Form is a presentation form of the Arabic letter yeh combined with a hamza diacritic, specifically designed for use at the beginning of a word or syllable in cursive Arabic script. It represents the glottal stop sound /ʔ/ followed by the vowel /i/ or /j/ and appears as a distinct glyph in connected text, where its initial shape differs from medial or final forms to maintain proper typographic flow. This character is part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block and is utilized in languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu to accurately render words that begin with a hamza over a yeh base.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FE8B
Version Added	1.1
Name	Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above Initial Form
Unicode 1.0 Name	Glyph for Initial Arabic Hamzah on Ya
Block	Arabic Presentation Forms-B
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Arabic Letter
Decomposition Type	Initial
Decomposition Mapping	"ئ" U+0626 Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ﺋ
HTML Hex Encoding	ﺋ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xBA 0x8B
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFE8B
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FE8B
C/C++/Java Escape	\ufe8b

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	"ئ" U+0626 Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above
NFKC Simple Casefold	"ئ" U+0626 Arabic Letter Yeh with Hamza Above
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