Home: go to the homepage U+0590 to U+05FF Hebrew
Glyph for U+05BF
Source: Noto Sans Hebrew

U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe

U+05BF was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block U+0590 to U+05FF Hebrew in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Nonspacing Mark and is mainly used in the Hebrew script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Nonspacing Mark. When changing direction it is not mirrored. U+05BF prohibits a line break before it.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

In Hebrew orthography the rafe or raphe (Hebrew: רָפֶה, pronounced [ʁaˈfe], meaning "weak, limp") is a diacritic (◌ֿ), a subtle horizontal overbar placed above certain letters to indicate that they are to be pronounced as fricatives.

It originated with the Tiberian Masoretes as part of the extended system of niqqud (vowel points), and has the opposite meaning of dagesh qal, showing that one of the letters בגדכפת is to be pronounced as a fricative and not as a plosive, or (sometimes) that a consonant is single and not double; or, as the opposite to a mappiq, to show that the letters ה or א are silent (mater lectionis).

The rafe generally fell out of use for Hebrew with the coming of printing, although according to Gesenius (1813) at that time it could still be found in a few places in printed Hebrew Bibles, where the absence of a dagesh or a mappiq was noticeable. (e.g. Exodus 20:13,14,15; Deuteronomy 5:13,17,18,19; 2 Samuel 11:1; Isaiah 22:10; Jeremiah 20:17; Psalm 119:99; Zechariah 5:11)

In some siddurs (e.g. those printed by ArtScroll) a diacritical symbol, typographically the same as the rafe, but utterly unrelated, is used to mark instances of "moving sheva" (Shva Na).

The rafe is similar in function to the buailte (dot above, denoting lenition) in the old-style Irish alphabet.

Representations

System Representation
1471
UTF-8 D6 BF
UTF-16 05 BF
UTF-32 00 00 05 BF
URL-Quoted %D6%BF
HTML hex reference ֿ
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ◌ֿ
Encoding: WINDOWS-1255 (hex bytes) CF
Adobe Glyph List afii57841
Adobe Glyph List rafe
Adobe Glyph List rafehebrew

Related Characters

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na) HEBREW POINT RAFE
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Hebrew
General Category (gc) Nonspacing Mark
Script (sc) Hebrew
Bidirectional Category (bc) Nonspacing Mark
Combining Class (ccc) Ccc23
Decomposition Type (dt) none
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
Alphabetic (Alpha)
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
Composition Exclusion (CE)
Case Ignorable (CI)
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
Cased (Cased)
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
Dash (Dash)
Deprecated (Dep)
Diacritic (Dia)
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
Emoji Component (EComp)
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
Emoji (Emoji)
Extender (Ext)
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Extend
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
Hex Digit (Hex)
Hyphen (Hyphen)
ID Continue (IDC)
ID Start (IDS)
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
IDSU (IDSU) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start) 0
Ideographic (Ideo)
InCB (InCB) Extend
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
Indic Positional Category (InPC) NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC) Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
Join Control (Join_C)
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
Math (Math)
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC) Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC) Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
Other ID Start (OIDS)
Other Lowercase (OLower)
Other Math (OMath)
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
Quotation Mark (QMark)
Regional Indicator (RI)
Radical (Radical)
Sentence Break (SB) Extend
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Extend
White Space (WSpace)
XID Continue (XIDC)
XID Start (XIDS)
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt) Transparent
Line Break (lb) Combining Mark
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+05BF Hebrew Point Rafe
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo) R