What ѱ means
It writes the consonant cluster “ps.”
Cyrillic psi was used especially in Church Slavonic for Greek loanwords with that sound. The usual account places the creation of Early Cyrillic for Christian books in Bulgaria in the late 9th century; the earliest dated Cyrillic evidence includes 921 and 931. Greek ψ is its model, while Cyrillic ѯ represents the related “ks” sound.
Where did old Cyrillic psi go?
Church Slavonic kept ѱ for liturgical spelling, but the 1708 civil-script reform removed it from secular Russian. Its printed shape can also differ from handwritten Church Slavonic forms, whose letter shapes varied more.
In ordinary text, ѱ reads as a deliberate archaic or Church Slavonic choice.
Part of the collection
Who writes ѱ
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Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ѱ 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.
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How to type or find ѱ
- Search it as
- ѱ · Cyrillic psi · old Cyrillic psi · Church Slavonic psi · ps letter
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ѱ\0471Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.