What ؏ means
It marks one quoted line of Urdu verse.
A misra is one line of a sher, an Urdu couplet (a two-line poem). In printed Urdu, ؏ starts a fresh line before the quoted verse, so the following text reads as an excerpt rather than ordinary prose.
The verse term is older than this sign and crosses Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu literary traditions. It comes from Arabic miṣrāʿ, a leaf of a folding door, which also came to name one half of a verse. Classical Arabic verse pairs two half-lines; Arabic poetry is attested around the fifth century CE. The sign appears in printed examples dated 1965 and 1995.
What if someone sends ؏ alone?
It is probably a poetry marker without its quoted line.
With a verse after it, it introduces one quoted misra from an Urdu couplet. Alone, it looks like a formatting cue separated from the words it should mark.
Why does ؏ look like ain?
Its shape resembles ع, but it is a different sign.
The Urdu encoding proposal distinguishes ؏ from Arabic letter ʿayn (ع) by its tail shape and role. Both can appear in Urdu text: ع is a letter used in words, while ؏ marks a quoted verse line.
A literary cue in Urdu print that makes a verse quotation look deliberate.
Do not mistake it for Arabic ʿayn (ع); the similar outline hides a separate sign.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ؏ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
9
How to type or find ؏
- Also called
- misra sign · Urdu misra sign · poetic line marker
- Search it as
- misra · Urdu · sher · couplet · verse · poetry · ain
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
؏\060FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.