What ࠹ means
It closes a reading unit; a blank line may follow. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, qitsa groups passages for reading and recitation. The Masoretic Pentateuch, a traditional Hebrew text of the same five books, also marks section breaks as open or closed. Annaau, a separate Samaritan mark, indicates longer pauses between actions.
An 1189 Samaritan manuscript documents punctuation in the script; additional signs are described as emerging around the turn from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. Why does qitsa look different? Manuscripts preserve several shapes, while one critical edition standardizes them to a basic form. A separate form, melodic qitsa, marks a sentence meant for melodic reading.
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Questions people ask
1Why does ࠹ 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.
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How to type or find ࠹
- Also called
- qitza · qissa
- Search it as
- qitsa · Samaritan punctuation · Samaritan section mark · qitsa symbol
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
࠹\0839Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.