What ⷌ means
A palatalized k followed by the Gurage e vowel.
Palatalized means the middle of your tongue rises toward the roof of your mouth as you make k. The vowel is the front e shown in Gurage sound charts.
Why does ⷌ belong to an older spelling?
It fills gaps in older Ethiopic spelling of Gurage sounds.
Sahle Selassie Berhane Mariam and linguist Wolf Leslau devised 44 Ethiopic letters for Chaha, a Gurage variety; their text appeared in Ethiopians Speak, Volume 2: Chaha in 1966. ⷌ extends the ከ row to palatalized k plus the e vowel order.
Ethiopia standardized a refinement in 2002. In 2013, the Gurage Zone reassigned palatalized k to the ኸ series, using ኼ for this vowel order. A Unicode proposal in 2021 described the broader Gurage framing for related varieties.
In 1996–97, computer fonts could misalign decomposed marks or substitute a glyph, changing its appearance without changing the phoneme.
Check the spelling system before treating ⷌ as a typo; it can be valid in older Gurage writing.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ⷌ 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.
How to type ⷌ
ⷌ\2DCCCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.