U+FEC8 "ﻈ" Arabic Letter Zah Medial Form Unicode Character

U+FEC8 "ﻈ" Arabic Letter Zah Medial Form is a presentation form variant of the Arabic letter Zah (ظ), specifically shaped for the medial position within a word when written in connected Arabic script. Used in languages such as Arabic and Persian, this glyph represents the voiced emphatic dental fricative sound /ðˤ/ and appears when the letter occurs between two other characters that join on both sides, ensuring proper cursive flow in typographic rendering. As part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block, this character primarily serves legacy or compatibility purposes in digital text, where modern fonts often automatically substitute it through contextual shaping algorithms rather than requiring explicit encoding of such positional forms.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FEC8
Version Added	1.1
Name	Arabic Letter Zah Medial Form
Unicode 1.0 Name	Glyph for Medial Arabic Dhah
Block	Arabic Presentation Forms-B
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Arabic Letter
Decomposition Type	Medial
Decomposition Mapping	"ظ" U+0638 Arabic Letter Zah

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ﻈ
HTML Hex Encoding	ﻈ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xBB 0x88
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFEC8
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FEC8
C/C++/Java Escape	\ufec8

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	"ظ" U+0638 Arabic Letter Zah
NFKC Simple Casefold	"ظ" U+0638 Arabic Letter Zah
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