U+FF6A "ｪ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Small E Unicode Character

U+FF6A "ｪ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Small E is a typographic variant of the standard katakana character エ (e), rendered at half the usual width to fit within monospaced or fixed-width text environments, particularly in legacy Japanese computing systems. It represents the small, or "sokuon" equivalent for the vowel sound /e/, often used to indicate a shortened or muted pronunciation in loanwords or informal writing, though it is distinct from the more common small tsu (ッ). This character is part of the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block in Unicode, serving a specific role in maintaining visual alignment in digital text where space is constrained, such as in terminals or older telecommunications formats.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FF6A
Version Added	1.1
Name	Halfwidth Katakana Letter Small E
Block	Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right
Decomposition Type	Narrow
Decomposition Mapping	"ェ" U+30A7 Katakana Letter Small E

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ｪ
HTML Hex Encoding	ｪ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xBD 0xAA
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFF6A
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FF6A
C/C++/Java Escape	\uff6a

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Conditional Japanese Starter
East Asian Width	Halfwidth
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"ェ" U+30A7 Katakana Letter Small E
NFKC Simple Casefold	"ェ" U+30A7 Katakana Letter Small E
Script	Katakana
Script Extensions	Katakana
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	Katakana
Sentence Break	OLetter