Blog / Deep Dives
Deep Dives
One character, the long version — where it came from, what it actually means, and the arguments people have had about it.
♭ Music Flat Sign Flat Type a lowercase b where a flat belongs and most readers will not notice, which is the whole problem. B♭ and Bb differ by one character; they sort differently, they search differently, and only one…♪ Eighth Note Two eighth notes live in the standard, and only one of them is meant for writing music. This one, U+266A, is a symbol: a single glyph carrying the idea of music, filed alongside the weather signs and…♦ Black Diamond Suit The odd one out of the four suits, in two ways nothing about the glyph would suggest. KS X 1001 encoded six of the eight suit characters and left out both diamonds, filled and hollow alike —…☔ Umbrella With Rain Drops Coloured without being asked, which is where this umbrella parts company with the plain one eighteen codepoints away. U+2614 carries the Emoji_Presentation property, so the bare character already…☃ Snowman There are two snowmen in the standard, and the one that shows up coloured is not this one. ⛄ at U+26C4 was carried by all three Japanese mobile networks, which put it in the first emoji set at E0.6…☀ Black Sun With Rays The Miscellaneous Symbols block gives away its origin in its first four characters. Unicode's own aliases for them run: clear weather, cloudy weather, rainy weather, snowy weather. That is why a sun…◦ White Bullet Nesting is what the hollow dot is for. Where bullet marks a first-level item, this one conventionally marks the level below it — a distinction printed outlines have made long enough that word…⊃ Superset Of Logicians and set theorists read this character differently, and both readings are current practice. Unicode records the set-theoretic one as its alias, includes in set: A ⊃ B says every member of B…∊ Small Element Of A second, smaller membership sign looks like an encoding mistake and is not one. Unicode's note explains it: the character originates in math pi fonts — the specialist sorts a typesetter kept…∁ Complement Prefix, not infix: you write ∁A, with the sign in front of its single operand, where union and intersection sit between two. That alone sets it apart from the infix operators it sits among, and it is…↯ Downwards Zigzag Arrow Down Zigzag Arrow Unicode records one meaning for this arrow, and it is not a direction. The alias printed beside U+21AF in the code chart is electrolysis: it is a chemistry sign, the jagged arrow drawn over a…♥ Black Heart Suit Valentine is Unicode's own alias for this character — the one card suit the standard openly admits has a life outside card games. That double duty is why the code chart cross-references it to four…♣ Black Club Suit Unicode's chart sends you from this character to U+2618 SHAMROCK, which is a better clue to the drawing than the English name is. The French deck calls the suit trèfle — clover — and the three-lobed…♠ Black Spade Suit Eight suit characters were encoded, not four. Unicode carries a filled and a hollow version of each suit, and in these names black means filled while white means hollow — U+2664 is this same spade…💲 Heavy Dollar Sign Unicode files the ordinary dollar sign as Sc, a currency symbol. It files this one as So — symbol, other. That single property is the whole distinction: the dollar sign takes part in currency…💱 Currency Exchange Most currency emoji name a currency. This one names a transaction — a pictograph of an act rather than a thing, which is odd company for a set otherwise built from objects, animals and faces. CLDR's…﹡ Small Asterisk Called small, classified wide. Its East Asian Width is W and its line-break class is ID, ideographic — the treatment a Han character gets. The contradiction dissolves once you know where the block…✶ Six Pointed Black Star Six points, solid, and not the Star of David. The difference is geometric before it is anything else: this is a star polygon, a single outline with six points radiating from a filled centre, while…✳ Eight Spoked Asterisk Three neighbours in the Dingbats block all read as "star" at a glance, and they get swapped for each other constantly. CLDR's keyword lists are the fastest way to keep them straight: this one is…Ⓒ Circled Latin Capital Letter C Normalise it and the circle disappears. Its compatibility decomposition is <circle> U+0043, so NFKC and NFKD both reduce it to a bare capital C — which matters more than it sounds, because the usual…₲ Guarani Sign Paraguay has had the guaraní since 1944; Unicode gave it a sign in 2005. Sixty-one years is a long wait for a national currency, and the standard is candid about the consequence — the chart…⁸ Superscript Eight Superscript Digit Eight For a long stretch of computing you could write x² and not x⁸. Windows-1252 carried exactly three raised digits — 0xB9, 0xB2 and 0xB3, the one, two and three inherited from ISO 8859-1 — and none of…⁑ Two Asterisks Aligned Vertically When a page runs out of footnote marks the traditional answer is to double them. The old sequence — asterisk, dagger, double dagger, section sign, parallels, pilcrow — starts over as doubled marks…⬅ Leftwards Black Arrow CLDR files this arrow under west. Its keyword list runs arrow, cardinal, direction, left, west — so the character most people reach for to mean "back" is, officially, also a compass bearing, and a…