What ꣾ means
It writes a short 'ai' vowel standard Devanagari lacks. The philologist Hoernle devised it in his 1880 grammar; Grierson and Kellogg adopted it; by 1903 some Benares scholars used it.
In Maithili it marks /əe̯/, the short counterpart of ऐ; writing ऐ instead changes the vowel. Unicode added it in 2018.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꣾ
Loading…
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
3ꣿ
Devanagari Vowel Sign Ay
The dependent vowel-sign form, used after consonants where ꣾ stands alone; encoded together.
Devanagari Letter Short E
Devanagari Letter Short E — a companion specialist letter for another short vowel.
Devanagari Letter Short O
Devanagari Letter Short O — the parallel companion for a short o.
Questions people ask
1Why does ꣾ show as a box?
Most fonts lack it; a 2023 Indology check found it only in Nirmala UI, Nirmala Text and Sanskrit Text.
More like this
10
How to type or find ꣾ
- Search it as
- ay · aĭ · short ai · U+A8FE · maithili · əe̯
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
Windows
HTML
ꣾCSS
\A8FEWord
Type a8fe, then press AltX.
HTML
ꣾ
Linux
CtrlShiftU, a8fe, Enter.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ꣾ
HTML hex
ꣾ
CSS content
content: "\A8FE";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EA%A3%BE
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.