Ethiopic syllable wa

ወ is a syllabic letter used within Ethiopic spelling. Fidel groups written forms into syllables, so read this character with the letters around it. In a Ge'ez transliteration—a way to write the script with Latin letters—this form is written wä; the two dots mark that convention's vowel. It is not a pronunciation guide shared by every language using Ethiopic.

South Arabian writing reached the Horn around the eighth century BCE. A recognizable Ethiopic script appears in inscriptions from the second/third centuries CE. People used it to write Ge'ez in royal inscriptions and manuscripts; by the fourth century CE, vowel marks had reshaped older consonant-based writing into a syllabary. This was a gradual change, not a single invention.

The script was later adapted, with changes and additions, for Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, and other languages, so ወ has no single sound label across them. Its documented historical ancestor is Old South Arabian 𐩥, the letter waw; this is a script-history connection, not just a resemblance.

how do you type ወ?

On Keyman's mnemonic Amharic layout, press w for ወ. In 2026, Keyman maps w to this first form in the w-series on a standard QWERTY keyboard; vowel keys select the other forms. Layouts for other languages may map keys differently.

Ethiopic fonts can draw different outlines for the same character. A changed shape by itself does not mean the letter changed.