U+FF8F "ﾏ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ma Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ﾏ
U+FF8F "ﾏ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ma is a typographic variant of the fullwidth katakana character マ, designed to occupy exactly half the width of a standard CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) character cell, which historically allowed it to fit neatly into monospaced text environments such as early computer terminals, teletype systems, and digital character grids. It represents the syllable "ma" in the Japanese katakana writing system and is part of the halfwidth forms block in Unicode, used primarily in contexts where space efficiency or compatibility with legacy hardware was necessary, such as in terminal emulators, vintage computer games, or certain character-constrained display systems.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+FF8F |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ma |
| Block | Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Narrow |
| Decomposition Mapping | "マ" U+30DE Katakana Letter Ma |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ﾏ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ﾏ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEF 0xBE 0x8F |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xFF8F |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000FF8F |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \uff8f |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFD Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Ideographic |
| East Asian Width | Halfwidth |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "マ" U+30DE Katakana Letter Ma |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "マ" U+30DE Katakana Letter Ma |
| 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 |