What means
It represents the /m/ sound in Garay. Garay m is a consonant letter written as part of a word. In Wolof, it corresponds to Latin m as a transliteration: both stand for /m/, but they belong to different scripts.
Garay began appearing in publications in January 1961. Senegalese creator Assane Faye designed it for Wolof, to give the language a script suited to its sounds and distinct from Latin and Arabic-based Wolofal. He later used Garay in textbooks, folktales, maps, and a Qur’an printed with a line-by-line translation.
How is Garay connected to Arabic?
Garay is a separate alphabet, with some Arabic influence. It is written from right to left, but its consonants do not join together like Arabic letters. Faye designed it to feel approachable to people familiar with Arabic writing. For Wolof, Latin and Arabic-based Wolofal are other writing traditions; they are not the same alphabet as Garay.
Garay has also been described as a marker of Wolof identity and preservation. As of 2025, Unicode described its user community as small, with teaching and literacy uses. On its own, points to a Garay writing context, though readers unfamiliar with the script may not recognize it.
signals a Garay writing context; readers unfamiliar with the script may not recognize it.
Sent alone, read it as a letter sample rather than a reaction.
Part of the collection
Who writes
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Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does show as a box or look misplaced?
The font may not support Garay, or it may display the script incorrectly. On 27 April 2026, a Garay orthography reference still described its font as an early prototype and warned that combining marks could be misplaced.
More like this
10
How to type or find
- Search it as
- m · Wolof m · Garay m · Garay letter · Wolof alphabet · Garay alphabet
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𐵲\10D72Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.