What ԭ means
It marks one consonant in historical Komi spelling.
In Komi, ԭ represents the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate /d͡ʑ/: a consonant made with a brief stop followed by friction, with the tongue near the hard palate. The letter gave this sound its own written sign.
The letter belongs to an older Komi spelling system, so seeing it usually points to historical text or specialist discussion.
Why is ԭ shaped like Д and Ч?
Its design joins the forms of Д and Ч into one letter.
This is a historical ligature: a single written character built by combining letter shapes. Pavel Savvaitov's Komi grammar records ԭ in 1850, with a description of the sound it represents.
That grammar also records ԫ, another special letter in the same historical spelling. In present-day Komi spelling, the corresponding affricate is written with the digraph дз; ICANN's RZ-LGR-6 code table labels this historical Komi use obsolete as of 2025.
Why is ԭ missing or different in my font?
The font may not include ԭ, or its design may vary.
A blank box means the selected font has no drawing for this character. That does not change the letter itself. Choose a font that covers the Cyrillic Supplement when its appearance matters.
Historical and specialist: ԭ appears in older Komi spelling and discussions of Cyrillic character support.
Treat ԭ as one historical letter, not the two-letter sequence ДЧ.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
2What is used for ԭ's sound in present-day Komi spelling?
The digraph `дз` is used for the corresponding affricate in present-day Komi spelling. ԭ belongs to an older single-letter system; retain it when transcribing a historical source.
Why does ԭ show as a box?
Your font may lack this glyph. Try a font that covers the Cyrillic Supplement; the underlying character remains ԭ.
How to type ԭ
ԭ\052DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.