Unicode Cyrillic Letter Multiocular O

7 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by s3tz

3 Comments

s3tz

7 hours ago

Multiocular O (ꙮ) is a unique glyph variant found in a single 15th-century manuscript (thereby a hapax legomenon), in the Old Church Slavonic phrase серафими многоꙮчитїи (abbreviated мн̑оꙮ҆читїи̑; serafimi mnogoočitii, 'many-eyed seraphim').

The character was proposed for inclusion into Unicode in 2007 and incorporated as character U+A66E in Unicode version 5.1 (2008). The representative glyph had seven eyes and sat on the baseline. However, in 2021, following a tweet highlighting the character, it came to linguist Michael Everson's attention that the character in the 1429 manuscript was actually made up of ten eyes. After a 2022 proposal to change the character to reflect this, it was updated later that year for Unicode 15.0 to have ten eyes and to extend below the baseline.

nephihaha

7 hours ago

I'm only seeing seven eyes.

It is strange to have a code for a symbol which only occurs once.