What ᎎ means
It writes the Gurage syllable pwee.
Its sound is p followed by a brief w-like glide and the vowel in “see”; Gurage added it to the labialized p series.
Sahle Selassie Berhane Mariam and linguist Wolf Leslau expanded the Ethiopic script used for Gurage to write its sounds. ᎎ appears in the 1966 second volume of Ethiopians Speak, a collection of stories in Chaha, a Gurage language.
Is ᎎ the modern Gurage form?
No. Modern Gurage uses 𞟾 for the corresponding syllable.
Keep ᎎ when preserving the older spelling.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ᎎ 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 ᎎ
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 138E, then Alt+X to get ᎎ.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “ethiopic syllable pwee”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 138e, then Enter or Space.
HTML
ᎎCSS
\138ELegacy input
Use a legacy Gurage keyboard layout or a Unicode hexadecimal input method and enter U+138E.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ᎎ
HTML hex
ᎎ
CSS content
content: "\138E";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E1%8E%8E
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.