What ꬁ means
It is a syllable inside an Ethiopic-script word. A 2009 proposal links it to Gamo-Gofa-Dawro and Basketo spelling, citing Gospel texts in Dawro, Gamo, Gofa and Basketo. Churches kept publishing in Ethiopic as those languages chose Latin; a box means missing font support.
Ethiopic writing is older than ꬁ
Ethiopic developed from South Arabian writing. Early regional inscriptions in pseudo-Sabaean, a South Arabian-style script, date to the 8th/7th centuries BCE. Around the 4th century CE, Ethiopic had become an abugida, a writing system where consonant signs also show vowels. This dates the writing tradition, not ꬁ's exact form.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ꬁ 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 ꬁ
ꬁ\AB01Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.