Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Ethiopic

U+1200 – U+137F   (4608–4991)

The Ethiopic range was introduced with version 3.0 of the Unicode Standard. There are more Ethiopic characters in the Ethiopic Extended, Ethiopic Extended-A and Ethiopic Supplement ranges. The Ethiopic script is used for several related Semitic languages that are or were spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic (the national language of Ethiopia), classical Ethiopic, Harari, Gurage, Tigre and Tigrinya. Ethiopic, which is also known as Ge'ez, is the traditional language of the Christian church in Ethiopia. Ethiopic is written left to right, which is unusual for a Semitic language. The writing system is also known as Fidel and Fidelat. You can find some Unicode Ethiopic at the Ethiopian News Headlines. You can find more information at The Ethiopic Unicode Resource Page and in the Computers & Technology category of Cyber Ethiopia.

Support for Ethiopic Unicode in Windows was introduced in 2007 with Windows Vista, which includes an Amharic keyboard driver and the Nyala font.

A free Geez Unicode keyboard layout for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP is available from http://members.lycos.co.uk/geezunicode/; it works with Microsoft Word and WordPad.

The characters that appear in the first column of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Abyssinica SIL, Code2000, Ethiopia Jiret, Fixedsys Excelsior, Free Idg Serif, Free Serif, Geez Unicode, GF Zemen Unicode, Nyala, Sun-ExtA, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Visual Geez Unicode, Visual Geez Unicode Agazian, Visual Geez Unicode Title and Yigezu Bisrat Gothic Goffer; and in the Unix Unicode font ClearlyU.

To see exactly which characters are included in a particular font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West’s BabelMap, or WunderMoosen’s FontChecker.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1200.pdf.

Copyright © 1999–2010 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 6.0.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2010 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in October 2010.

Created 4th October 1999 – Last updated 7th November 2010