U+FECF "ﻏ" Arabic Letter Ghain Initial Form Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+FECF "ﻏ" Arabic Letter Ghain Initial Form is a presentation form of the Arabic letter ghain, which represents the voiced uvular fricative sound /ɣ/ similar to a French or German "r". It is used specifically when the letter appears at the beginning of a word or in an initial position within a connected cursive sequence in Arabic script, where its shape changes from the isolated form to a right-joining variant that attaches seamlessly to the following letter. This character is part of the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block, which encodes contextual glyph variants for compatibility with older text processing systems and is not typically needed for modern Unicode text, as standard Arabic encoding handles positional shaping through font rendering. Sources: Unicode Standard, Arabic script characteristics, and Wikipedia.

General Properties

Code Point U+FECF
Version Added 1.1
Name Arabic Letter Ghain Initial Form
Unicode 1.0 Name Glyph for Initial Arabic Ghain
Block Arabic Presentation Forms-B
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Arabic Letter
Decomposition Type Initial
Decomposition Mapping "غ" U+063A Arabic Letter Ghain

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ﻏ
HTML Hex Encoding ﻏ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xEF 0xBB 0x8F
UTF-16 Encoding 0xFECF
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000FECF
C/C++/Java Escape \ufecf

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 "غ" U+063A Arabic Letter Ghain
NFKC Simple Casefold "غ" U+063A Arabic Letter Ghain
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