What ꗱ means
It writes the Vai syllable romanized fɛ.
Vai is a syllabary: each character stands for a spoken syllable, not a single consonant or vowel. The Latin-letter spelling fɛ is a romanization, a way to represent Vai sounds with Latin letters. Vai text runs from left to right.
The script took shape in Liberia in the early 1830s, chiefly through Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ of Jondu, who later said a dream inspired him. An account from 1834 links its creation to the wish to write Vai letters like those exchanged in Monrovia. Character shapes changed as the script spread and was standardized; a comparison follows examples from 1834–2005. Possible influence from Arabic, Latin, or Cherokee writing remains debated, as does the possibility that Vai regularized an earlier picture-based writing system.
How to type ꗱ
Use a Unicode Vai input method and a Unicode-capable font.
Ordinary typing on a Latin keyboard will not produce the syllable. Some legacy 8-bit Vai fonts use font-specific character mappings rather than Unicode Vai text, which may not display as intended in other software.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ꗱ 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 ꗱ
ꗱ\A5F1Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.