U+30C5 "ヅ" Katakana Letter Du Unicode Character

U+30C5 "ヅ" Katakana Letter Du is a Japanese katakana syllabary character representing the sound "du," which is a voiced variant of the base character "ツ" (tsu). It is formed by adding a dakuten diacritic, a small stroke resembling quotation marks, to the top right of "ツ." In modern Japanese, "ヅ" is used primarily in specific contexts, such as in rendaku (sequential voicing) within compound words or in certain loanwords, but it appears much less frequently than its hiragana counterpart "づ" due to phonetic shifts in standard Tokyo dialect that often merge its pronunciation with "ズ" (zu). Despite this, it remains an essential part of the katakana set, typically employed in transcription of foreign terms, onomatopoeia, or technical vocabulary where precise orthography is required.