This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Arabic script.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it is written as Arabic letter from right to left. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+0649 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it. The glyph can be confused with 270 other glyphs.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic ʾalifا, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Hebrew ʾālefא, North Arabian 𐪑, Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶף ʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.
Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ([ʔ]), the sound found in the catch in uh-oh. In Arabic, the alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. In texts with diacritical marks, the pronunciation of an aleph as a consonant is rarely indicated by a special marking, hamza in Arabic and mappiq in Tiberian Hebrew. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). When this practice began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE). Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BEʾMODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING, based on the Greek spiritus lenisʼ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph.
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
1609
UTF-8
D9 89
UTF-16
06 49
UTF-32
00 00 06 49
URL-Quoted
%D9%89
HTML hex reference
ى
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
Ù‰
Encoding: CP720 (hex bytes)
EE
Encoding: CP1256 (hex bytes)
EC
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 31 87 33
Encoding: ISO8859_6 (hex bytes)
E9
Encoding: CP420 (hex bytes)
DA
Adobe Glyph List
afii57449
Adobe Glyph List
alefmaksuraarabic
digraph
j+
RFC 5137
\u'0649'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u0649
C and C++
\u0649
C#
\u0649
CSS
\000649
Excel
=UNICHAR(1609)
Go
\u0649
JavaScript
\u0649
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{649}
JSON
\u0649
Java
\u0649
Lua
\u{649}
Matlab
char(1609)
Perl
"\x{649}"
PHP
\u{649}
PostgreSQL
U&'\0649'
PowerShell
`u{649}
Python
\u0649
Ruby
\u{649}
Rust
\u{649}
Click the star button next to each label to set this representation as favorite or remove it from the favorites. Favorites will be shown initially. (Favorites are stored locally on your computer and never sent over the internet.)