What ৺ means
Its position tells you whether it marks the dead or names the divine.
Before a deceased person's name, it is read as svargiya, meaning “heavenly” and used like “the late.” Where God's or another deity's name would go, it serves as a reverential substitute. The prefix and substitute are separate uses, not extra emphasis.
Graves Champney Haughton's Bengali grammar Rudiments of Bengálí Grammar, published in 1821, records ৺ before a dead person's name as “the late Rāmachandra.” That documents the memorial use by 1821; it does not date the sign's origin.
Can Assamese readers use ৺ the same way?
No; a 2010 Assamese proposal describes a narrower memorial use.
Rabin Deka's 2010 proposal describes a separate Assamese heavenly-abode sign for names of the dead, without the Bengali deity-name substitution. It distinguishes that sign's shape and placement from ৺, so its account does not establish that the same exact glyph serves both traditions.
Memorial or devotional; before a name, it carries formal reverence.
Before a living person's name, it reads as a death notice.
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsDon't confuse it with
4Questions 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.
How to type ৺
৺\09FACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.