U+FEBF "ﺿ" Arabic Letter Dad Initial Form Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
U+FEBF "ﺿ" Arabic Letter Dad Initial Form is a contextual variant of the Arabic letter Ḍād (ض), specifically designed to appear at the beginning of a word when connected to a following character within cursive Arabic script. Rendered as a bold, sweeping shape with a prominent loop and a rightward connecting stem, this initial form differs visually from the isolated (ﻀ) and medial/final forms of the same letter, ensuring proper typographic flow in connected text. It represents the emphatic consonant /dˤ/, a distinctive sound in Arabic phonology, and is used in words like "ﺿﺮﻭﺭﻱ" (ḍarūrī, meaning "necessary"), where it appears as the first character before the letter ر (rāʾ). This glyph is part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block in Unicode, encoding a positional variant that is essential for accurate digital rendering of Arabic script.
General Properties
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding |
ﺿ |
| HTML Hex Encoding |
ﺿ |
| UTF-8 Encoding |
0xEF 0xBA 0xBF |
| UTF-16 Encoding |
0xFEBF |
| UTF-32 Encoding |
0x0000FEBF |
| C/C++/Java Escape |
\ufebf |
Unicode Properties