Author: Thom Holwerda
Source
The character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated in version 15.0.0. Because it doesn’t have enough eyes. It needs to have three more eyes. This character is rare. Very, very rare. Rare enough to occur in a single phrase, in a single text written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic. The text is a copy of the Book of Psalms, written around 1429 and kept in Russia. Basically, in some old Slavic languages, authors would stylise the “O” in their word for eye (“ꙩкꙩ”) by adding a dot in the middle to make it look like an eye. If there were two eyes, two of these characters would be joined together (“ꙭчи”). The final evolution of this character was “ꙮ”, used only once in human history, in the phrase “серафими многоꙮчитїи”, which translates to “many-eyed seraphim”. Here’s how this relates to Unicode: the person who originally added this character to Unicode made a mistake, and didn’t count the number of eyes correctly. There should be ten eyes, not seven. This error was discovered in 2020, and now it has been corrected. Awesome.
