What ෫ means
It means five in Sinhala Lith Illakkam. This is a historical Sinhala numeral set.
Sinhala script developed from Southern Brahmi. Sri Lankan rock inscriptions preserve Brahmi-like numerals from about the 3rd century CE, an earlier layer of Sinhala number writing. A cross-line distinguished numerals from letters; later proposals suggested it for Lith digits, though fonts may omit that manuscript cue.
Lith served horoscopes and planetary calculations; some palm-leaf manuscripts use it for page numbers. Manuscript records also include Sinhala Illakkam, Pansal Hodiya (the temple-school alphabet), Tamil numerals and the familiar Indo-Arabic digits 0–9. These digits later took over everyday counting; Lith persisted into the early twentieth century.
As of 2026, ෫ reads as a historical Sinhala astrological numeral.
Use 5 for ordinary Sinhala counting.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ෫ 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 ෫
෫\0DEBCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.