LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA·U+0251

ɑ

Character Information

Code Point
U+0251
HEX
0251
Unicode Plane
Basic Multilingual Plane
Category
Lowercase Letter

Character Representations

Click elements to copy
EncodingHexBinary
UTF8
C9 91
11001001 10010001
UTF16 (big Endian)
02 51
00000010 01010001
UTF16 (little Endian)
51 02
01010001 00000010
UTF32 (big Endian)
00 00 02 51
00000000 00000000 00000010 01010001
UTF32 (little Endian)
51 02 00 00
01010001 00000010 00000000 00000000
HTML Entity
ɑ
URI Encoded
%C9%91

Description

U+0251, also known as the Latin Small Letter Alpha, plays a significant role in digital typography and linguistics. It is a lowercase letter in the Latin script, often used as a basic element for other alphabetic systems or in cryptographic contexts. The character is widely employed in digital text encoding, particularly in the Unicode Standard, where it serves as a foundational character for representing various scripts and languages. Its typical usage often involves serving as a base letter for creating accented characters, making it an essential building block for numerous languages. Despite not being part of any specific language's alphabet, U+0251 holds immense cultural and linguistic importance, underpinning the structure of many written languages worldwide. In summary, U+0251 is a crucial element in digital text encoding and an indispensable building block for numerous scripts and languages, highlighting its technical significance and cross-cultural relevance.

How to type the ɑ symbol on Windows

Hold Alt and type 0593 on the numpad. Or use Character Map.

  1. Step 1: Determine the UTF-8 encoding bit layout

    The character ɑ has the Unicode code point U+0251. In UTF-8, it is encoded using 2 bytes because its codepoint is in the range of 0x0080 to 0x07ff.

    Therefore we know that the UTF-8 encoding will be done over 11 bits within the final 16 bits and that it will have the format: 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
    Where the x are the payload bits.

    UTF-8 Encoding bit layout by codepoint range
    Codepoint RangeBytesBit patternPayload length
    U+0000 - U+007F10xxxxxxx7 bits
    U+0080 - U+07FF2110xxxxx 10xxxxxx11 bits
    U+0800 - U+FFFF31110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx16 bits
    U+10000 - U+10FFFF411110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx21 bits
  2. Step 2: Obtain the payload bits:

    Convert the hexadecimal code point U+0251 to binary: 00000010 01010001. Those are the payload bits.

  3. Step 3: Fill in the bits to match the bit pattern:

    Obtain the final bytes by arranging the paylod bits to match the bit layout:
    11001001 10010001