What ዚ means
It writes one syllable; the word around it gives the meaning. Geʽez, an ancient Ethiopian language, was the first language written in this script. The same script is also used for Amharic and Tigrinya; in Tigrinya, እዚ means “this,” with ዚ as its final syllable.
The script’s earliest reported inscription comes from Dakhanamo; that does not date this individual syllable. South Arabian writing reached the Horn of Africa around the eighth century BCE, and local inscriptions show Sabaean and Ethiopian features. By the fourth century CE, vowel marking had changed an earlier consonant-only system into a left-to-right series in which each sign represented a syllable.
Is ዚ an emoji? No: it is an Ethiopic writing character, not a reaction.
Alone, it gives you a syllable, not a message; read the whole word or ask for a translation.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ዚ 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 ዚ
ዚ\12DACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.