Bengali Letter Sa
Copy and paste the bengali letter sa symbol স (U+09B8) instantly. Part of the Bengali Unicode block.
Works everywhere: websites, documents, social media, code editors
Character Codes
About This Symbol
- Name
- Bengali Letter Sa
- Unicode Block
- Bengali
- Code Point
- U+09B8
The Bengali Letter Sa (স) is a Unicode character assigned to the Bengali block at code point U+09B8. This block contains characters used across a variety of applications including technical documentation, web development, mathematical notation, and everyday digital communication. The bengali letter sa symbol can be inserted directly into text or referenced through its HTML entity, CSS code, or JavaScript escape sequence for use in websites and applications.
How to Use
- 1.Click "Copy Symbol" above to copy স to your clipboard
- 2.Paste it anywhere with Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V on Mac)
- 3.Or use the HTML entity
সin your code - 4.For CSS, use
\09B8with the content property
Understanding Bengali Letter Sa
At code point U+09B8, the bengali letter sa (স) occupies a carefully chosen position within the Bengali allocation. The Unicode Consortium assigned this character to address the need for a reliable, cross-platform representation of this symbol in electronic documents and interfaces.
The hexadecimal value 09B8 places this character at decimal position 2488 in the Unicode table. In UTF-8, it is encoded in three bytes, which affects storage considerations when this character appears frequently in a document. For web use, the HTML entity স provides a reliable fallback when direct character insertion is not possible.
Known by its descriptive name referencing "bengali letter," this character serves a specific role that generic symbols cannot fill. It appears in specialized typography, technical standards, and digital content where precision in symbol choice directly affects meaning or layout.
About Devanagari & Indian Scripts
The Indic script family encompasses ten major writing systems encoded in Unicode, all descended from the ancient Brahmi script. Devanagari, the most widely used, serves Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali. Each sister script — Bengali's flowing curves, Tamil's circular forms, Gujarati's open tops — developed distinct visual identities while sharing a common structural logic: consonant-vowel syllables formed through base characters and combining marks. Together they enable digital communication for over a billion people across South Asia.
Brahmi script, attested from the 3rd century BCE in Emperor Ashoka's rock edicts, is the ancestor of nearly all South and Southeast Asian writing systems. As Brahmi spread across the subcontinent, regional variations crystallized into distinct scripts by the medieval period. Devanagari emerged around the 10th century CE, its name meaning 'divine city script.' Tamil claims an independent evolution from a southern Brahmi variant and is one of the world's longest continuously used scripts. The encoding of Indic scripts in Unicode required modeling complex rules for vowel signs, conjunct consonants, and reordering — behaviors that vary by script and that no previous computing standard had adequately addressed.
Common Uses
- •Digital communication in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and other Indian languages
- •Government documents and official communications across Indian states
- •Sanskrit scholarly texts and religious manuscript digitization
- •Multilingual web content for the Indian subcontinent
- •Language preservation for minority Indic languages
Technical Notes: Indic scripts require complex text layout engines that handle consonant conjuncts (where multiple consonants merge into a single glyph), vowel sign reordering (where a vowel that follows a consonant logically is displayed before it visually), and the virama/halant mechanism for suppressing inherent vowels. Each script has its own shaping rules defined in the OpenType specification. The Unicode encoding model stores characters in logical order, and the rendering engine must transform this into correct visual order — a process significantly more complex than Latin or even Arabic shaping.
Cultural Context: India's linguistic diversity is reflected in its currency notes, which display the denomination in 17 scripts. The choice of script is deeply tied to regional and linguistic identity — efforts to impose a single script (whether Devanagari or Latin) on all Indian languages have met strong resistance. Each script carries the weight of its literary tradition: Tamil's Sangam poetry, Bengali's Tagore literature, Kannada's Vachana movement. Digitizing these scripts has been essential for preventing the marginalization of regional languages in the internet age.