U+3091 Hiragana Letter We
U+3091 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 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 glyph is not a composition. Its East Asian Width is wide. In bidirectional text it is written from left to right. When changing direction it is not mirrored. U+3091 offers a line break opportunity at its position, except in some numeric contexts.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
ゑ in hiragana, or ヱ in katakana, is an obsolete Japanese kana that is normally pronounced [e] in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "ゑ゙" in hiragana was introduced to represent [ve] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is presumed that 'ゑ' represented [we] , and that ゑ and え indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura and Taishō periods, when they both came to be pronounced as 'イェ' [je] , later shifting to the modern 'エ' [e]. Along with the kana for wi ('ゐ' in hiragana, 'ヰ' in katakana), this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with え and エ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form 'ウェ' (U-[small-e]) is used, as in "ウェスト" for "west".
The kana still sees some modern-day usage as a stylistic variant of 'え/エ'. Ebisu is usually written as "えびす", but sometimes "ゑびす" like Kyoto Ebisu Shrine (京都ゑびす神社, Kyōto Webisu Jinja), and name of the beer Yebisu (ヱビス), which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition (ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版, Wevangeriwon Shin Gekijōban). VTuber Sakamata Chloe (沙花叉クロヱ) of Hololive Production uses Katakana ヱ (we) in place of the pronounced エ (e). Katakana ヱ is sometimes written with a dakuten, ヹ, to represent a /ve/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the digraph ヴェ is far more common. The Meiji-era Classical Japanese version of the Bible renders Jehovah as ヱホバ (Yehoba), and ヱ (ye) is also used to transcribe any Hebrew name spelled with Je in English (pronounced "ye" in Hebrew, though), such as Jephthah (ヱフタ, Yefuta); the modern Japanese version, on the other hand, only uses エ (e), hence エホバ (Ehoba) and エフタ (Efuta).
Hiragana ゑ is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the mora /we/. In the Ryūkyū University system, ゑ is also combined with a small ぃ (ゑぃ/ヱィ), to represent the sound /wi/. Katakana ヱ is used in Ainu for /we/.
Representations
| System | Representation |
|---|---|
| Nº | 12433 |
| UTF-8 | E3 82 91 |
| UTF-16 | 30 91 |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 30 91 |
| URL-Quoted | %E3%82%91 |
| HTML hex reference | ゑ |
| Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | ã‚‘ |
| Encoding: BIG5 (hex bytes) | C6 F5 |
| Encoding: BIG5HKSCS (hex bytes) | C7 78 |
| Encoding: CP932 (hex bytes) | 82 EF |
| Encoding: CP949 (hex bytes) | AA F1 |
| Encoding: CP950 (hex bytes) | C6 F5 |
| Encoding: EUC_JP (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: EUC_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: EUC_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: EUC_KR (hex bytes) | AA F1 |
| Encoding: GB2312 (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: GBK (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
| Encoding: HZ (hex bytes) | 7E 7B 24 71 7E 7D |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_1 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2004 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_3 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_EXT (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 24 71 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_KR (hex bytes) | 1B 24 29 43 0E 2A 71 0F |
| Encoding: JOHAB (hex bytes) | DD F1 |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS (hex bytes) | 82 EF |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | 82 EF |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | 82 EF |
| Adobe Glyph List | wehiragana |
| digraph | we |
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 1.1 (1993) | |
| HIRAGANA LETTER WE | |
| — | |
| Hiragana | |
| Other Letter | |
| Hiragana | |
| Left To Right | |
| Not Reordered | |
| none | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| ✘ | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| ✘ | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| ✘ | |
| None | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Yes | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other Letter | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| None | |
| wide | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Ideographic | |
| none | |
| not a number | |
| Hiragana Letter We | |
| U |