U+FEC9 "ﻉ" Arabic Letter Ain Isolated Form Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+FEC9 "ﻉ" Arabic Letter Ain Isolated Form is the presentation form of the Arabic letter 'Ain, which represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative consonant sound [ʕ], a guttural sound common in Arabic that has no direct equivalent in English. This specific code point is part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block, used primarily for compatibility with older text processing systems that require distinct glyph shapes for each positional variant of a letter. In standard Unicode, the base character for Ain is U+0639 (ع), but U+FEC9 encodes the isolated form that appears when the letter stands alone or at the end of a word without connecting to a following character. Visually, it resembles a rounded loop with a small initial stroke, and it is widely used in Arabic script for writing words such as "عربي" (Arabic).

General Properties

Code Point U+FEC9
Version Added 1.1
Name Arabic Letter Ain Isolated Form
Unicode 1.0 Name Glyph for Isolate Arabic Ain
Block Arabic Presentation Forms-B
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Arabic Letter
Decomposition Type Isolated
Decomposition Mapping "ع" U+0639 Arabic Letter Ain

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ﻉ
HTML Hex Encoding ﻉ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xEF 0xBB 0x89
UTF-16 Encoding 0xFEC9
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000FEC9
C/C++/Java Escape \ufec9

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 "ع" U+0639 Arabic Letter Ain
NFKC Simple Casefold "ع" U+0639 Arabic Letter Ain
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