What is Tag Latin Small Letter?

Tag Latin Small Letter is a set of invisible format characters in the Unicode Tags block (U+E0000–U+E007F), consisting of 26 characters corresponding to the lowercase Latin letters a–z. They were originally used for embedded language tags (now deprecated) and are now primarily used to compose emoji tag sequences (ETS) for spelling subregion identifiers.

Basic Information

Property	Value
Unicode Block	Tags (U+E0000–U+E007F)
Plane	Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (SSP)
Introduced Version	Unicode 3.1 (2001)
Character Range	U+E0061 – U+E007A (a–z)
General Category	Cf (Format)
Rendering	Invisible (zero-width)
Current Primary Use	Component of emoji tag sequences (ETS)

Code Point Table

These characters map the ASCII letters a–z (U+0061–U+007A) to the Tags block. Some code points are as follows:

Code Point	Formal Name	Letter
U+E0061	TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A	a
U+E0062	TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER B	b
U+E0063	TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER C	c
...	...	...
U+E007A	TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER Z	z

The block also includes TAG SPACE (U+E0020), TAG DIGIT 0–9 (U+E0030–U+E0039), TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A–Z (U+E0041–U+E005A), and the terminator CANCEL TAG (U+E007F).

History and Usage Evolution

Original Design (Deprecated): The Tags block was originally designed for plain text embedded language tags (starting with U+E0001, followed by tag characters spelling a BCP 47 language code, and terminated by U+E007F). This usage was formally deprecated starting with Unicode 5.1.
Current Use: Unicode 8.0/9.0 repurposed this block (except U+E0001) for emoji tag sequences. The sequence starts with a base emoji (e.g., the black flag 🏴), followed by tag letters spelling a subregion code (e.g., gbeng for England), and ends with U+E007F.

Example (England flag):

🏴 (U+1F3F4) + g (U+E0067) + b (U+E0062) + e (U+E0065) + n (U+E006E) + g (U+E0067) + CANCEL TAG (U+E007F)

Supporting systems will render it as 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, while unsupported systems will fall back to showing 🏴.