U+FE8D "ﺍ" Arabic Letter Alef Isolated Form Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ﺍ
U+FE8D "ﺍ" Arabic Letter Alef Isolated Form is a presentation form of the Arabic letter alef, used specifically in the initial or isolated position within a word when rendered in certain cursive Arabic scripts. This character represents the glottal stop sound /ʔ/ or functions as a long vowel /aː/, depending on its diacritical markings, and it appears as a vertical stroke without the medial or final connecting ligatures found in other forms like U+FE8E or U+0627. As part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block, it is designed for compatibility with legacy text rendering systems and ensures correct glyph shaping in contexts where contextual substitution is required.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+FE8D |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Arabic Letter Alef Isolated Form |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Glyph for Isolate Arabic Alef |
| Block | Arabic Presentation Forms-B |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Arabic Letter |
| Decomposition Type | Isolated |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ا" U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ﺍ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ﺍ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEF 0xBA 0x8D |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xFE8D |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000FE8D |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ufe8d |
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 | "ا" U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "ا" U+0627 Arabic Letter Alef |
| 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 |