U+FF9C "ﾜ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Wa Unicode Character

U+FF9C "ﾜ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Wa is a narrow variant of the standard fullwidth katakana character ワ used in Japanese writing, designed for compatibility with older text systems and legacy character encodings that required a fixed halfwidth width. It represents the syllable "wa" and forms part of the halfwidth katakana block in Unicode, which was created to map to certain legacy character sets used in early computer terminals and digital text formats. This character is often found in contexts where space is constrained or where compatibility with older software and hardware is necessary, though it is less commonly used in modern Japanese typography, which generally prefers fullwidth characters for readability and consistency.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FF9C
Version Added	1.1
Name	Halfwidth Katakana Letter Wa
Block	Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right
Decomposition Type	Narrow
Decomposition Mapping	"ワ" U+30EF Katakana Letter Wa

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ﾜ
HTML Hex Encoding	ﾜ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xBE 0x9C
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFF9C
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FF9C
C/C++/Java Escape	\uff9c

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	"ワ" U+30EF Katakana Letter Wa
NFKC Simple Casefold	"ワ" U+30EF Katakana Letter Wa
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