What ⲉ means
It marks a vowel in Coptic spelling. The Coptic alphabet adapted Greek letters to write Egyptian and added signs from Demotic, an earlier Egyptian script, for sounds Greek lacked. ⲉ belongs to its Greek-derived core.
Greek letters were used to write Egyptian in the first and second centuries CE, including in magical and astrological texts where vowel signs helped preserve how spoken formulas were pronounced. Writing on pottery sherds dated 150–225 preserves Old Coptic transcriptions. A fuller Coptic writing system took shape in the third century CE. Regional forms varied. By the early modern period, Coptic was no longer in everyday use but remained in church liturgy and scholarship.
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Who writes ⲉ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ⲉ 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.
More like this
11
Collections with ⲉ
1
How to type or find ⲉ
- Also called
- ei
- Search it as
- Coptic letter e · Coptic Eie · Greek epsilon
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ⲉ\2C89Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.