Home: go to the homepage U+FF00 to U+FFEF Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
Glyph for U+FF70
Source: Noto CJK

U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark

U+FF70 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block U+FF00 to U+FFEF Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms 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 a narrow version of the glyph Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark. Accordingly, its width in East Asian Text is halfwidth. In bidirectional text it is written from left to right. When changing direction it is not mirrored. This katakana joins with other adjacent katakana to form a word. U+FF70 prohibits line breaks before its position. There are some exceptions, though.

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 ("one").

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

The following table shows the usual hiragana equivalents used to form a long vowel, using the ka-gyō (the ka, ki, ku, ke, ko sequence) as an example.

Onbiki 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").

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, "or" is usually represented by a long ō (oo or ou) vowel, with the word "torch" becoming トーチ tōchi.

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
65392
UTF-8 EF BD B0
UTF-16 FF 70
UTF-32 00 00 FF 70
URL-Quoted %EF%BD%B0
HTML hex reference ー
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ◌ー
Adobe Glyph List katahiraprolongmarkhalfwidth

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na) HALFWIDTH KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
General Category (gc) Modifier Letter
Script (sc) Common
Bidirectional Category (bc) Left To Right
Combining Class (ccc) Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt) narrow
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
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+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Any
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) None
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+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) No
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) No
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) Other Letter
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Katakana
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+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) halfwidth
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt) Non Joining
Line Break (lb) Conditional Japanese Starter
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+FF70 Halfwidth Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark
Script Extension (scx) Hiragana Katakana
Vertical Orientation (vo) R