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.
⊂ Subset Of Two textbooks can print this symbol and mean different things by it, and both are ordinary practice. For one camp it is the general inclusion — every member of A is a member of B, the two possibly…∧ Logical And Transcribe it as a caret and a C compiler will read exclusive or. That is the trap worth knowing: ^ is the nearest ASCII shape, and in nearly every language that uses it the meaning is XOR or…∠ Angle The one annotation Unicode attaches to this character points away from geometry: it is "used in astrological contexts for aspect semisquare", the forty-five-degree relationship between two planets.…⇢ Rightwards Dashed Arrow Right Dashed Arrow Its East Asian Width is Neutral, and UAX #11 is unusually blunt about what that means: neutral characters "do not occur in legacy East Asian character sets". The width class is therefore a small…≥ Greater-than Or Equal To Greater Than Or Equal To Cross it through and you do not get a two-piece composite — you get U+2271 NEITHER GREATER-THAN NOR EQUAL TO, a codepoint of its own, which Unicode nonetheless defines as a canonical decomposition of…› Single Right-pointing Angle Quotation Mark Right Pointing Single Guillemet Most of the time this mark turns up on a web page it is not quoting anything. It has become the chevron of interface text — the separator in a breadcrumb trail, the tail on a "read more ›" link, the…‟ Double High-reversed-9 Quotation Mark Double Reversed Comma Quotation Mark Windows-1252 pulled four curly quotes into its upper range — 0x91 to 0x94, the left and right singles and doubles — and this one was not among them, nor was its single-width twin. That absence…‛ Single High-reversed-9 Quotation Mark Single Reversed Comma Quotation Mark Rotate a comma through 180 degrees and lift it to cap height: that is this mark. It is not the mirror image of a closing quote, which is what most people assume — mirroring would put the tail on the…‗ Double Low Line Spacing Double Underscore ISO 8859-8 put this character at 0xDF, the last slot before Hebrew alef takes over the upper half at 0xE0. Microsoft's Hebrew code page, Windows-1255, left that byte undefined and encoded the…↖ North West Arrow Upper Left Arrow Here is an asymmetry you can check in Unicode's own emoji data: the four plain cardinal arrows — ← ↑ → ↓ — are not emoji, while the four diagonals and the two double-headed arrows are. This is one of…Ⅳ Roman Numeral Four This is not the Roman numeral to use. It exists for round-trip compatibility with East Asian encodings that carried a single-cell numeral, and Unicode files it with a compatibility decomposition…₳ Austral Sign Six and a half years is the entire life of the austral. It was introduced on 15 June 1985, withdrawn on 31 December 1991, and replaced in 1992 by the convertible peso at ten thousand australs to the…ⁿ Superscript Latin Small Letter N Of everything in Superscripts and Subscripts, this is the odd one out: general category Lm, a modifier letter, where its neighbours are digits and operators. The difference is not cosmetic — it…‚ Single Low-9 Quotation Mark Low Single Comma Quotation Mark It sits on the baseline and looks exactly like a comma, and in German, Czech and Slovak text it opens a quotation. The pairing is asymmetric in a way English typography never uses: this mark opens…‖ Double Vertical Line Double Vertical Bar Two bars, two constituencies. Mathematicians set them in pairs around a value to mean its norm — Unicode's annotation records exactly that, "used in pairs to indicate norm of a matrix". Traditional…₮ Tugrik Sign Mongolia's tögrög has been in circulation since 9 December 1925, when it was introduced at a value equal to one Soviet ruble. Its sign waited a great deal longer for a codepoint: Unicode encoded it…⇠ Leftwards Dashed Arrow Left Dashed Arrow Dashing an arrow is a way of saying "sort of". In UML a dashed arrow is a dependency rather than an association; in diagram-chasing it is conventionally the morphism whose existence is being claimed…₢ Cruzeiro Sign A ligature rather than an invention: a capital C with a lower-case r nested into it, standing for cruzeiro. Brazil's official abbreviation was Cr$ — the two letters and a single-stroke dollar sign…⏯️ Play Or Pause Button One button meaning two things depending on what the player is currently doing — the toggle every remote control has had for decades, encoded as a single character rather than a pair. Unicode's alias…↺ Anticlockwise Open Circle Arrow Undo, refresh, rotate, replay: one loop of arrow, four meanings, and no agreement anywhere about which direction belongs to which. This is the anticlockwise member of the pair, and it is the shape…↗ North East Arrow Upper Right Arrow Unicode names its arrows by compass point, which is why the up-and-to-the-right arrow is filed as NORTH EAST ARROW while CLDR calls the same character "up-right arrow". Both describe the glyph; only…‹ Single Left-pointing Angle Quotation Mark Left Pointing Single Guillemet The single guillemet's job is the quote inside the quote. French sets a primary quotation in doubled guillemets and drops to this pair when the speaker quotes someone else; Swiss usage does the same…🧾 Receipt Two entries in this character's CLDR keyword list have nothing to do with shopping: evidence and proof. The rest are accounting, bookkeeping, invoice and receipt. The annotation has quietly absorbed…🦕 Sauropod Unicode did not encode a brontosaurus. It encoded a sauropod — the whole clade of long-necked, long-tailed, small-headed dinosaurs — and left the species question deliberately open. CLDR's keyword…