What ꣙ means
It represents nine in its own numeral set.
Saurashtra is a language related to Gujarati and spoken in southern India; its script belongs to the Brahmic family of South Asian writing. The familiar 9 has the same value, but a different numeral shape.
A primer from 1876 shows an older script stage with different glyphs and character inventory. Unicode dates the modernized script to the 1880s, when some joined consonant forms were simplified.
Books in Telugu, Tamil, Devanagari, and Saurashtra scripts have appeared since the late 19th century. A 2003 comment on a Unicode proposal records the script on wedding invitations and signs as a community identity marker.
Script-specific and number-focused; surrounding words supply the social tone.
If it appears as a box, the active font lacks Saurashtra coverage; the underlying text still identifies this digit.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ꣙ 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 ꣙
꣙\A8D9Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.