U00E6

U+00E6, also written as LATIN SMALL LETTER AE, is a Unicode code point for the ash ligature. It represents a single character that is the lowercase form of the ligature ae. Its uppercase counterpart is U+00C6, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE. U+00E6 resides in the Latin-1 Supplement block of Unicode.

The character æ is used in several languages, notably Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese, where it is treated as a distinct letter. It generally represents a front vowel sound, commonly transcribed as [æ], and behaves as an independent unit in spelling and collation.

In digital text, æ is encoded as U+00E6. It can be entered directly on many keyboards, or via character maps and input methods. In HTML and other markup, the character may be written as æ (named entity) or as numeric entities æ or æ.

Historically, the ligature appears in Old English, Icelandic, and other historical orthographies. In modern English, æ is rarely used outside scholarly or stylistic contexts, with the two-letter sequence "ae" or "a e" substitution common in everyday text. Some English words retain the ligature in traditional spellings, such as encyclopaedia.

Unicode includes U+00E6 to support accurate rendering of languages that include the ash ligature, and most modern fonts provide æ. Where fonts lack it, systems typically substitute the two-letter sequence "ae".