What ꛨ means
It writes the sound tɛt in the Bamum alphabet. Inside a Bamun word it simply spells one syllable; it stands for a sound, not an idea. The same glyph doubles as the script's digit 3.
The alphabet is young and has a named author: King Njoya of Bamum, in present-day Cameroon, began it around 1896; first-version manuscripts survive from 1897; he kept refining it to the compact A-ka-u-ku syllabary by 1910, which served his court for administration, schools, law and religion.
The script was designed locally; its streamlining is often compared with Liberia's Vai syllabary, a parallel of method, not ancestry. French colonial suppression in the 1930s broke its schools and print tradition. The early phases differ so much that Unicode encodes them separately as Bamum Supplement.
is ꛨ a letter or the number 3?
Both: one glyph, two jobs. In a Bamun word, read tɛt; in a Bamum numeral, read the digit 3. Position decides: among letters a sound, among numerals a value. For the everyday digit, write ordinary 3; ꛨ means three only inside Bamum writing.
how do i type ꛨ?
No standard keyboard has a ꛨ key. It takes a Unicode route: A6E8 then AltX in Windows Word, or CtrlShiftU then a6e8 on Linux. For longer Bamun text, install a Bamum layout; as of 2026, Keyman covers desktop, web and mobile. A box where ꛨ should be means the font lacks Bamum coverage.
Outside Bamum writing, ꛨ reads as deliberate script use, not a typo for 3.
If you mean three, type 3: ꛨ shows as a box without Bamum fonts and reads tɛt with them.
Drift: As of 2026, heritage teaching, archives and digital keyboards are rebuilding access to Bamum: a literacy revival, not a new meaning for ꛨ.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꛨ
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What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsRead it as the syllable tɛt.
Combination ideas
1Worth knowing
- ꛨ is one of ten Bamum letters doubling as digits; a Bamum number can look like a short word.
Questions people ask
1why is ꛨ a box?
Your font lacks Bamum coverage. Unicode stores the character, but the font must hold the glyph; Noto Sans Bamum is one that does.
More like this
10
How to type or find ꛨ
- Also called
- tet · tɛt · tèt
- Search it as
- bamum tet · bamum 3 · bamun 3
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꛨ\A6E8Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.