Coptic Capital Letter Fi

Ⲫ is the capital form of Coptic fi, a letter used inside words. Its reading varies by dialect, and it descends from Greek phi.

Text symbol

What Ⲫ means

Coptic fi is used inside words. Its lowercase form is ⲫ; Latin transliteration writes it ph.

Coptic adapted Greek letters for Egyptian, adding Demotic, an older Egyptian script, for sounds Greek lacked. Greek-based writing appears late in the fourth century BCE; literary Coptic took shape around the turn of the third century CE to record Egyptian speech and Christian scripture.

In Bohairic, ⲫ is an aspirated p (p followed by a puff of breath). Sahidic rarely uses it for ⲡϩ, a two-letter sequence. A box means the font lacks Ⲫ.

Part of the collection

Ⲁ

Coptic Alphabet & Letters

Who writes Ⲫ

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Don't confuse it with

Greek Capital Letter Phi

Greek phi is a separate letter that resembles Ⲫ; use the Coptic character in Coptic text.

Questions people ask

Why does Ⲫ 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.