Precomposed character

A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diacritical mark, such as é (Latin small letter e with acute accent). Technically, é (U+00E9) is a character that can be decomposed into an equivalent string of the base letter e (U+0065) and combining acute accent (U+0301). Similarly, ligatures are precompositions of their constituent letters or graphemes.

Precomposed characters are the legacy solution for representing many special letters in various character sets. In Unicode, they are included primarily to aid computer systems with incomplete Unicode support, where equivalent decomposed characters may render incorrectly.