U+3065 HIRAGANA LETTER DU

U+3065 was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Hiragana in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Hiragana script. The character is also known as ZU (not unique).

The glyph is a Canonical composition of the glyphs . It has a Wide East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. In text U+3065 behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type OLetter for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

つ, in hiragana, or ツ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Both are phonemically /tu͍/ although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [t͡su͍].

The sokuon, which are used mainly to indicate consonant gemination, are identical but somewhat smaller.

The dakuten forms づ, ヅ, pronounced the same as the dakuten forms of the su kana in most dialects (see yotsugana), are uncommon. They are primarily used for indicating a voiced consonant in the middle of a compound word (see rendaku), and they can never begin a word.

In the Ainu language, it can be written with a handakuten (which can be entered into a computer as either one character (ツ゚) or two combined characters (ツ゜)) to represent the sound [tu͍], which is interchangeable with the katakana ト゚.

The katakana form is becoming increasingly popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face, thus this ㋡ variant was created. The small kana っ/ッ is also commonly used at the end of lines of dialogue in fictional works as a symbol for a glottal stop.

• ヅァ, ヅェ and ヅォ are used in gairaigos, these pronunciation are not same as ズァ(zwa), ズェ(zwe) and ズォ(zwo).