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ቊ

ethiopic syllable qwi

Ethiopic Qwi

ቊ is the Ethiopic qwi syllable: a q made at the back of the mouth with rounded lips, followed by i. It occurs inside words; the surrounding word carries the meaning.

Text symbol
Also called
qwi · qʷi
Search it as
fidel
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ቊ means

It is the i-vowel member of the rounded-q series.

In Ethiopic writing, related forms pair a consonant with a particular vowel; each form represents a syllable.

Fonts can draw ቊ differently; Unicode fixes the character, not a fixed outline. Ethiopic writing grew from South Arabian writing, which reached the region around the eighth century BCE. Clear Ethiopic writing appears in the second/third centuries CE; vowel notation was in place by the fourth century. The script first served the Ge'ez language, then Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre.

Don't confuse it with

4
ሀ
Ethiopic Syllable Ha
shares “ethiopic”, “syllable”
ሁ
Ethiopic Syllable Hu
shares “ethiopic”, “syllable”
ሂ
Ethiopic Syllable Hi
shares “ethiopic”, “syllable”
ሃ
Ethiopic Syllable Haa
shares “ethiopic”, “syllable”

Questions people ask

1

Why does ቊ 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 ቊ

Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 124A, then Alt+X to get ቊ.
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 qwi”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 124a, then Enter or Space.
HTML
ቊ
CSS
\124A
Ethiopic keyboard
An Ethiopic keyboard maps consonant–vowel keys to one syllable character; the sequence varies because Unicode does not standardize it.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ቊ
HTML hex
ቊ
CSS content
content: "\124A";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E1%89%8A
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.

Families this belongs to

1

African scripts2,275 symbols

ϢϣϤϥϦϧϨϩϪϫϬϭ