Katakana Letter Small Ho

At code point U+31F9, the katakana letter small ho (ㇹ) occupies a carefully chosen position within the Katakana Phonetic Extensions 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 31F9 places this character at decimal position 12793 in the Unicode table. At this position, the character falls 9 positions past the nearest hex boundary, a detail relevant for font engineers mapping glyph tables. For practical use, ㇹ in HTML or \u{31F9} in JavaScript are the most common insertion methods.

Known by its descriptive name referencing "katakana 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.

Japanese employs two syllabaries alongside Chinese-derived kanji: hiragana, with its flowing cursive strokes for native words and grammatical particles, and katakana, with its angular forms for foreign loanwords, emphasis, and technical terms. Together they form the backbone of Japanese writing, appearing in virtually every sentence. The halfwidth and fullwidth forms block accommodates the legacy of Japanese computing, where mixing Latin and Japanese characters required two distinct character widths.

Both hiragana and katakana descended from Chinese characters during Japan's Heian period (794–1185). Court women, largely excluded from formal Chinese literary education, developed hiragana as a simplified cursive script — the resulting literary tradition produced masterworks like The Tale of Genji. Buddhist monks simultaneously developed katakana by extracting components from Chinese characters to annotate religious texts. The modern standardized forms were fixed during the Meiji era reforms. Japan's early computing industry adopted fullwidth Latin characters to maintain grid alignment with CJK characters, a convention that persists in Unicode's Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block.