CJK Unified Ideograph-2A708

It is Japanese kana compressed into one historical character. It is pronounced tomo and stands for the two katakana syllables トモ fused into a single written unit. Unicode files it among the Han ideographs — the Chinese-character family — but indexes it under the katakana component モ. The block is a shelf, not a definition: this is not a Chinese word.

Scribes fused frequent syllable pairs into single signs, a shorthand grouped today with the kana ligatures — gōryaku-gana (合略仮名) in Japanese. Surviving examples show a recognizable compact トモ by 1493, with clearer fused forms documented in 1529 and 1781. It served inside ordinary words such as もっとも; the dakuten form 𪜈゙ reads ドモ, as in すれども.

Why did people stop using 𪜈?

A 1900 spelling reform favored one kana per sound. School policy pushed ligatures and multi-syllable kana out of the set children were taught, and 𪜈 became effectively obsolete for ordinary writing. It survives in transcriptions of older texts, not as a routine modern spelling.

A reader steeped in historical Japanese expands it as トモ on sight; a modern reader may meet an unfamiliar Han-looking glyph, a fallback box, or nothing. Sent on its own, read it as archaic or specialist, not a normal message.