Zanabazar had created it for the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit or Tibetan, and both he and his students used it extensively for that purpose.

It also has some relevance to linguistic research, because it reflects certain developments in the Mongolian language, such as that of long vowels.

The two variations of the Soyombo symbol are used as special characters to mark the start and end of a text.

Two of its elements (the upper triangle and the right vertical bar) form the angular base frame for the other characters.

A short oblique hook at the bottom of the vertical bar marks a long vowel.

In Mongolian, a final consonant is written with a simplified variant of the basic letter in the bottom of the frame.

Sanskrit also includes the syllabic consonants ṛ and ḷ, which are treated as vowels and may be short or long.

Sanskrit transcription also requires two additional diacritics, the anusvara ⟨◌𑪖‎⟩, which indicates that a vowel is nasalised, and the visarga ⟨◌𑪗‎⟩, which indicates post-vocalic aspiration.

[4] Apart from the Soyombo symbol, the only punctuation mark is a full stop, represented by a vertical bar.

The Unicode block for Soyombo is U+11A50–U+11AAF: The Menksoft IMEs provide alternative input methods.