Joiners, selectors and fillers
KHMER INHERENT VOWELS (U+17B4-U+17B5)
Two invisible Khmer vowel signs, AQ and AA, which spell out a vowel that is normally implied rather than written.
- Range
U+17B4-U+17B5- Also written as
u17b4-u17b5- Category
- Joiners, selectors and fillers
- Removed by default
- When free-floating
- Governing option
- Aggressive
-a - Can be load-bearing
- Yes
There is no copy and paste button on this page, on purpose: this is a block of characters rather than one, and none of them is something you need to paste on its own.
Where it comes from
Khmer text produced by input methods that write the inherent vowel explicitly. Outside Khmer they are invisible characters with no purpose.
Why it matters
Unicode itself discourages their use, so they are unusual even in Khmer, and being unusual, invisible and script-specific makes them an easy place to hide something.
Before and after
A Khmer vowel with no Khmer consonant to attach to.
The character is shown as a labelled chip so you can see where it sits. In your text it draws nothing at all.
When it is legitimate
Directly after a Khmer consonant, where the vowel sign is being written out instead of left implied.
How to remove it
Removed by the default pass unless the previous kept character is a Khmer letter; `-a` removes them in that position too.
Working in a file rather than a paste? The document report for .docx, .odt and .html finds it inside the file, together with hidden runs and tracked changes, without you having to open it. If the question is what the rest of the writing does rather than what this one character does, measure sentence-length variation and see where each habit sits, with no score and no claim about who wrote the text.
Is it an AI watermark?
Not a watermark
No. Script-specific vowel signs. Their presence says something about the keyboard that produced the text, not about the author.
No connection to machine-generated text. It comes from software, from a keyboard, or from a person.
Questions
Is Khmer text safe to clean?
Yes with the defaults: after a Khmer letter these are kept and reported. Only `-a` removes them.
Why does Unicode discourage them?
Because the inherent vowel is normally implied by the consonant. Writing it explicitly creates two encodings of the same word, which breaks search and comparison.
Check your own text
Paste anything into the cleaner to see every hidden character it contains, with position, codepoint and what happens to each one. Nothing is uploaded.
Check your own textClean it in Chrome as you pasteClean it on your Mac with one keystrokeAll characters