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ⲵ

coptic small letter old coptic ain

Coptic Small Letter Old Coptic Ain

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ⲵ is an Old Coptic letter used for an Egyptian sound Greek did not have. One papyrus uses it for /ʕ/, while another manuscript gives it a glottal-stop reading, so it is not a fixed equivalent of Arabic ع.

Text symbol

What ⲵ means

It has different readings in surviving texts.

Old Coptic grew from the Greek alphabet with Demotic signs added for Egyptian sounds Greek lacked. An Oxyrhynchus papyrus uses ⲵ for /ʕ/; another Old Coptic manuscript uses it for a glottal stop. Its Demotic source is linked to a hieroglyphic sign group depicting a forearm with a papyrus roll. Later Coptic writing of Arabic used a different letter for ع, so ⲵ is not a direct substitute for that Arabic letter.

Part of the collection

Ⲁ
Coptic Alphabet & Letters
Explore 107 more →

Who writes ⲵ

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Don't confuse it with

1
⋖
Less-Than With Dot
Mathematical less-than with dot, a math symbol. Unicode lists it as a confusable of Old Coptic Ain; it is an operator, not a letter.

Questions people ask

1

Why does ⲵ show as a box on some devices?

Not every system ships a font for the Coptic block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.

How to type or find ⲵ

Search it as
ⲵ · ayin · Coptic keyboard · coptic letter ain · lowercase ain · left chevron dot
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
⎇Alt+XType 2CB5, then AltX to get ⲵ.
Windows
⊞Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win .).
macOS
⌃Control+⌘Command+␣SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “coptic small letter old coptic ain”.
Linux
⎈Ctrl+⇧Shift+UType 2cb5, then Enter or Space.
HTML
ⲵ
CSS
\2CB5
How to type ⲵ
Use a Unicode-aware Coptic keyboard. If it appears as a box, your font may lack Coptic coverage.
Why is ⲵ a box on my screen?

fsymbols draws rare signs with its own fonts, so they show here even where your device has none. An app or website without such a font shows an empty box (□) or a question mark instead. Turn our fonts off to see each sign as your device draws it by itself: a box here means a box in your chats and documents too.

Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ⲵ
HTML hex
ⲵ
CSS content
content: "\2CB5";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E2%B2%B5
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

African scripts2,275 symbols

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