Ethiopic Syllable Po

Ethiopic Syllable Po at U+1356 is a Geʽez-script syllabic letter representing the consonant p with the vowel o. It is part of the Ethiopic block, whose characters are used to write languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea in an abugida where each sign normally encodes a consonant-vowel combination. In everyday text, ፖ appears most often in Amharic, Tigrinya, and related Ethiopic-script writing for words and names containing the syllable po. Because p is less central than many native Ethiopic consonants, this letter is especially common in loans, modern terminology, and proper names, such as spellings of foreign names or words beginning with po. It also appears in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, literacy materials, and transliteration tables when explaining the Ethiopic “p” series: ፐ pe, ፑ pu, ፒ pi, ፓ pa, ፔ pē, ፕ pə, and ፖ po. In digital text, it should be treated as a normal Ethiopic letter rather than as Latin “po” written with two separate characters, since that distinction matters for searching, sorting, and accurate spelling.