Home U+30A0 to U+30FF Katakana
Glyph for U+30FC
Source: Noto CJK

U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark

U+30FC was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block U+30A0 to U+30FF Katakana in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Modifier Letter and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. It is also used in the scripts Hiragana, Katakana.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Wide East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 25 other glyphs. In text U+30FC behaves as Conditional Japanese Starter regarding line breaks. It has type Other Letter for sentence and Katakana for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The chōonpu (Japanese: 長音符, lit. "long sound symbol"), also known as chōonkigō (長音記号), onbiki (音引き), bōbiki (棒引き), or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese symbol that indicates a chōon, or a long vowel of two morae in length. Its form is a horizontal or vertical line in the center of the text with the width of one kanji or kana character. It is written horizontally in horizontal text and vertically in vertical text (

). The chōonpu is usually used to indicate a long vowel sound in katakana writing, rarely in hiragana writing, and never in romanized Japanese. The chōonpu is a distinct mark from the dash, and in most Japanese typefaces it can easily be distinguished. In horizontal writing it is similar in appearance to, but should not be confused with, the kanji character 一 ("one").

The symbol is sometimes used with hiragana, for example in the signs of ramen restaurants, which are normally written らーめん/らあめん in hiragana, and ラーメン in katakana. Usually, however, hiragana does not use the chōonpu but another vowel kana to express this sound.

Ombiki may also be found after kanji as indication of phonetic, rather than phonemic, length of a vowel (as in "キョン君、電話ー").

The following table shows the usual hiragana equivalents used to form a long vowel, using the ha-gyō (the ha, hi, fu, he, ho sequence) as an example.

When rendering English words into katakana, the chōonpu is often used to represent a syllable-final sequence of a vowel letter + r, which in English generally represents a long vowel if the syllable is stressed and a schwa if unstressed (in non-rhotic dialects such as Received Pronunciation; in rhotic dialects (such as General American) it may additionally be an R-colored vowel). For example, both "ar" and "er" are usually represented by a long ā (aa) vowel, with the words "number" and "car" becoming ナンバー (nanbā) and カー (kā).

In addition to Japanese, chōonpu are also used in Okinawan writing systems to indicate two morae. The Sakhalin dialect of Ainu also uses chōonpu in its katakana writing for long vowels.

Representations

System Representation
12540
UTF-8 E3 83 BC
UTF-16 30 FC
UTF-32 00 00 30 FC
URL-Quoted %E3%83%BC
HTML hex reference ー
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ◌ー
Encoding: JIS0208 (hex bytes) A1 BC
Adobe Glyph List prolongedkana
digraph -6

Related Characters

Confusables

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK
Unicode 1 Name
Block Katakana
General Category Modifier Letter
Script Common
Bidirectional Category Left To Right
Combining Class Not Reordered
Decomposition Type None
Decomposition Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Lowercase
Simple Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Uppercase
Simple Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Simple Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Case Folding Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
ASCII Hex Digit
Alphabetic
Bidi Control
Bidi Mirrored
Composition Exclusion
Case Ignorable
Changes When Casefolded
Changes When Casemapped
Changes When NFKC Casefolded
Changes When Lowercased
Changes When Titlecased
Changes When Uppercased
Cased
Full Composition Exclusion
Default Ignorable Code Point
Dash
Deprecated
Diacritic
Emoji Modifier Base
Emoji Component
Emoji Modifier
Emoji Presentation
Emoji
Extender
Extended Pictographic
FC NFKC Closure Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Grapheme Cluster Break Any
Grapheme Base
Grapheme Extend
Grapheme Link
Hex Digit
Hyphen
ID Continue
ID Start
IDS Binary Operator
IDS Trinary Operator and
Ideographic
Indic Mantra Category
Indic Positional Category NA
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Jamo Short Name
Join Control
Logical Order Exception
Math
Noncharacter Code Point
NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Casefold Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Other Alphabetic
Other Default Ignorable Code Point
Other Grapheme Extend
Other ID Continue
Other ID Start
Other Lowercase
Other Math
Other Uppercase
Prepended Concatenation Mark
Pattern Syntax
Pattern White Space
Quotation Mark
Regional Indicator
Radical
Sentence Break Other Letter
Soft Dotted
Sentence Terminal
Terminal Punctuation
Unified Ideograph
Variation Selector
Word Break Katakana
White Space
XID Continue
XID Start
Expands On NFC
Expands On NFD
Expands On NFKC
Expands On NFKD
Bidi Paired Bracket Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Bidi Paired Bracket Type None
East Asian Width Wide
Hangul Syllable Type Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment
Joining Group No_Joining_Group
Joining Type Non Joining
Line Break Conditional Japanese Starter
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value not a number
Simple Case Folding Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Script Extension Hiragana Katakana
Vertical Orientation Tr