What ꙃ means
It was an old Cyrillic letter for the voiced /dz/ sound.
Dzelo’s name means “very” in Old Church Slavonic. The letter marked one voiced sound made by joining d and z, keeping it distinct from plain /z/.
An early manuscript witness is Old Novgorodian Birchbark Letter 591, dated c. 1025–1050. Its recognizable predecessor is Glagolitic Dzelo Ⰷ, from the ninth-century script used for Old Church Slavonic religious texts.
Use ꙃ when an old spelling matters
In later Cyrillic writing, ѕ took over Dzelo’s letter role. Manuscripts can use ꙃ as a letter and Ѕ as a numeral, so keep the source’s form when transcribing it. The sound merged with /z/ in many Slavic varieties, while Church Slavonic spelling preserved the distinction.
Macedonian standardization revived related ѕ for /dz/ in 1944. That later letter is a historical relative, not a substitute for ꙃ in an older text.
Historical and specialist: it belongs in manuscript transcription, Church Slavonic texts, and script scholarship.
Keep ꙃ when transcribing an old source; ѕ has a later letter role, and Ѕ can be a numeral.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꙃ
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Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ꙃ display as a box or blank?
The character is drawn by a font, so it may be missing when the selected font lacks support for this part of Cyrillic. Try a font with Cyrillic Extended-B coverage.
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How to type or find ꙃ
- Also called
- dzelo · dzělo · dzeló
- Search it as
- ꙃ · Ⰷ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꙃ\A643Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.