What means
It represents /ɖ/, a voiced retroflex consonant.
The tongue tip curls back, briefly stops the air, then releases it as the vocal folds vibrate.
How did Ol Onal begin?
It was created as a script for Bhumij.
Mahendra Nath Sardar developed Ol Onal from 1981 to 1992; the Adim Bhumij Samaj chose it in a 1992 contest. Bhumij, spoken in eastern India, is also written in Odia, Bengali, Devanagari and Latin scripts. By 2022, its original lowercase companion, Galang Onal, had fallen out of teaching and print. Ol Onal appears in primers; examples from 2020–2022 show it in rituals, memorials, wedding invitations and public notices.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why can old Ol Onal text look like Latin?
Because fonts from 2013–2014 mapped Ol Onal forms to Latin character slots. Those files store Latin letters, not Unicode Ol Onal; a Unicode font can reveal the underlying Latin text.
How to type
𞗤\1E5E4Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.