U+A738 "Ꜹ" Latin Capital Letter Av Unicode Character

U+A738 "Ꜹ" Latin Capital Letter Av is a historical typographic ligature used primarily in medieval and early modern manuscripts to represent the Latin diphthong "au" or the vowel sound "aw," often appearing in abbreviations or scribal shorthand within Latin, Old English, and related Germanic texts. It is classified under the Latin Extended-D block, which contains a variety of specialized, archaic, or phonetic characters, and was included in Unicode to support the accurate digital preservation and scholarly study of pre-modern writing systems. Its lowercase counterpart, U+A739 "ꜹ," follows the same phonetic function, and the character is occasionally referenced in paleography and philology when transcribing original sources where space-saving ligatures were common.