U+FE8B ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE INITIAL FORM

U+FE8B was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Arabic Presentation Forms-B in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Arabic script.

The glyph is a Initial composition of the glyphs . It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Arabic Letter and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 1 other glyphs. In text U+FE8B behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type OLetter for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Hamza (Arabic: حمزة‎, hamzah) (ء) is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop [ʔ]. Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters, and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from the Arabic letter ‘ayn. In the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, from which the Arabic alphabet is descended, the glottal stop was expressed by aleph (), continued by alif (  ) in the Arabic alphabet. However, alif was used to express both a glottal stop and a long vowel /aː/. To indicate that a glottal stop, and not a mere vowel, was intended, hamza was added diacritically to alif. In modern orthography, under certain circumstances, hamza may also appear on the line, as if it were a full letter, independent of an alif.