Combining Latin Small Letter H

It preserves a raised h used as an abbreviation in historical writing. In medieval manuscripts, a small letter above the line could stand for letters left unwritten. Editors making a transcription—a written version of a source text—can keep this raised form visible instead of expanding it.

There is no single automatic expansion. The source's language, region, period, and the scribe's convention shape what the raised letter stands for, so ͪ alone does not specify an expansion.

This sign belongs to an encoded group of superscript letter marks rooted in regional scribal practice. Later, philologists—scholars who study historical texts—used the group to represent these forms digitally instead of replacing them with modern letters.

Why does ͪ break?

It needs a base letter immediately before it. Type a base letter, then place ͪ directly after it. Alone or at the start of a string, a combining mark has nothing to attach to; software may show a dotted circle as a fallback or leave a floating mark.

The font and rendering system decide where the mark sits relative to the base, so the same pair can look centered in one typeface and shifted in another. Unicode's reference drawing does not dictate every font's placement.