What ꕹ means
It marks one spoken syllable in Vai.
Vai writing is a syllabary: each sign represents a whole syllable. The conventional Latin transcription for this one is “mboo,” roughly “mbo.” Vai is spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The syllabary took shape around 1833 in Jondu, Liberia, led by Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ and his circle as a way to write Vai. Bukẹlẹ later said a dream inspired it. The earliest dated manuscripts in a comparative dataset begin in 1834. The script served correspondence, records, and religious translation. Teaching and later standardization shaped it before digital encoding. Its design influenced scripts for Mende, Loma, and Kpelle; a proposed link with Cameroon’s Bamum script is less certain.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꕹ
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Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ꕹ show as a box?
It can. A font without Vai support may show a missing-glyph box, while another font may draw the same character differently. The design can vary without changing the character.
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12
How to type or find ꕹ
- Search it as
- mboo · Vai mboo · Vai script · Vai syllabary · Vai text · Vai keyboard · Vai font
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꕹ\A579Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.