What ጺ means
On GFF, type Si; other Ethiopic layouts may differ.
On the GFF Ethiopic layout, S selects the ጸ consonant row and i selects its third vowel form, producing ጺ. Unicode does not prescribe keyboard mappings, so another Ethiopic layout may assign different keys.
The Ethiopic script grew from South Arabian consonant writing, or an abjad that mainly records consonants, and became a way to write Ge'ez. Early inscriptions in Ethiopia and Eritrea use pseudo-Sabaean, a South-Arabian-style consonant script, and date to the 8th/7th centuries BCE. An Ethiopian form was used for Ge'ez in the 1st–3rd centuries CE; vowel marks turned it into an abugida in the 4th century CE, where each sign's form marks a consonant-vowel syllable. Also called fidel, the script later served Amharic, Tigre, Oromo, and other languages. Their sound conventions can differ, so “tsi” is a lookup label rather than a universal pronunciation.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ጺ look different in another font?
Ethiopic fonts can draw the same syllable with different outlines. A changed outline alone does not mean a different character.
How to type ጺ
ጺ\133ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.