Combining Ligature Left Half

It is the opening half of a combining mark that spans letters. FE20 attaches after the first base letter; FE21 closes the mark after the final covered letter. Together they draw a ligature or tie across the letters between them.

The documented practical use is transliteration: in 2002, a Unicode mailing-list discussion describes FE20 and FE21 over Latin letters in Library of Congress romanized Cyrillic bibliographic data, marking those letters as one Cyrillic character. That is an encoding and typography job, not a standalone message.

The closest full-mark relative is U+0361, COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE, which Unicode lists alongside FE20 and FE21. As of 2026, the sources checked here do not establish a single inventor, a manuscript-first origin, or a cultural meaning shift for FE20; its defensible trail is encoding and library-text use.

How do I type FE20?

Insert it as a combining mark after the first base letter. For a complete span, place FE20 after the first letter, put the covered letters next, then place FE21 after the last: i︠u︡. Copy FE20 from the palette above, or insert it through a character viewer or Unicode input method.

If your text needs one whole tie rather than split endpoints, use U+0361, the full combining double inverted breve. Use FE20 and FE21 when the transliteration workflow expects separate left and right halves.

Why does FE20 look wrong?

The font or text shaper may not attach the mark correctly. A browser-support test notes that the result depends on the browser, installed fonts, and font-selection settings. A 2002 Unicode discussion records the practical failure mode: Romanized Cyrillic data contained FE20 and FE21, but available fonts might not combine them over the letters.

The glyph itself is not vendor-designed emoji artwork. It is a nonspacing mark whose placement is negotiated by the font; if the font lacks suitable support, the pair can look detached or fail to appear as intended. Test the complete sequence in the target typeface.