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.
🥔 Potato CLDR's keyword list for 🥔 runs to three words: food, potato, vegetable. That is about as bare as an emoji annotation gets, and it undersells a character that English idiom keeps busy — couch potato…🤘 Sign Of The Horns Index and little finger up, thumb folded in — and that last detail is the whole distinction. Extend the thumb as well and the handshape becomes the American Sign Language sign for "I love you", which…☐ Ballot Box ☐ is a checkbox nobody has ticked yet, and Unicode encodes it as a symbol rather than as a shape. That is the entire difference between U+2610 and the white square at U+25A1. A given font may draw…∛ Cube Root Unicode encodes three radicals and then stops. The square root at U+221A, this one at U+221B with the index 3 drawn into the glyph, and the fourth root at U+221C. There is no fifth root character and…∘ Ring Operator f ∘ g means "apply g, then f", and this is the character for it. Unicode gives U+2218 two aliases: composite function and APL jot. The second is a reminder that APL, a language written almost…∉ Not An Element Of As far as Unicode is concerned, ∉ is not an atomic character. U+2209 carries a canonical decomposition to element of followed by U+0338, the combining long solidus overlay — the standard saying…∆ Increment Mac OS Roman put this character at 0xC6 — a mathematical operator handed a slot in a general-purpose text encoding, while Greek capital delta U+0394, which most fonts draw identically, got none. That…₰ German Penny Sign The timing is hard to beat. U+20B0 shipped in Unicode 3.2 in March 2002, about two months after the Pfennig stopped being legal tender — euro cash arrived across the eurozone on 1 January 2002 and…₯ Drachma Sign Unicode gave the drachma a sign in September 1999. A little over two years later the currency was gone — Greek drachma notes and coins stopped being legal tender when euro cash arrived on 1 January…₭ Kip Sign Unicode's annotation for U+20AD is a single word: Laos. The character is the sign for the Lao kip, and it arrived in Unicode 3.0 in September 1999 alongside a batch of other currency signs — the…₤ Lira Sign Unicode encoded this character and then, in the same entry, advised against using it. Two annotations sit under U+20A4: "intended for lira, but not widely used" and "preferred character for lira is…″ Double Prime 5′ 11″ is a height, not a quotation. This is the seconds mark — inches in imperial measurement, arcseconds in coordinates, seconds of arc or time in astronomical notation — and Unicode records its…‧ Hyphenation Point Open a print dictionary and the headwords are peppered with small raised dots: dic·tion·ar·ies. That is this character's whole job — marking the places where a word may legally break across a line —…„ Double Low-9 Quotation Mark Low Double Comma Quotation Mark German opens a quotation at the bottom of the line. „So sagte er" begins with this character and closes with the left double quotation mark — the shape English uses to open. Unicode sides with the…❤️🩹 Mending Heart Nothing here is a new character. What renders as a bandaged heart is a zwj sequence: the red heart, its emoji variation selector, a zero-width joiner, and U+1FA79 ADHESIVE BANDAGE. Four codepoints…🤞 Crossed Fingers Its Unicode name reads like an assembly instruction: HAND WITH INDEX AND MIDDLE FINGERS CROSSED. The literalism is deliberate. The standard names the configuration rather than the meaning, because…🤌 Pinched Fingers The proposal that got this encoded was titled "What do you want?" — L2/19-159, filed in 2019 by Adriano Farano, Jennifer 8. Lee and Theo Schear of Emojination — and the title is still the best gloss…💖 Sparkling Heart Two entries in this character's CLDR keyword list have nothing to do with love: morning and night. That is a usage pattern surfacing in the annotation data — the sparkling heart is the one that gets…∃ There Exists A capital E turned to face the other way, and the reversal is the whole idea: where the universal quantifier is an upside-down A for "all", this is a backwards E for "exists". The turned-letter trick…₫ Dong Sign The glyph is a lowercase d with a bar through its ascender, which is also exactly what the Vietnamese letter đ looks like — and that collision is the thing to get right. U+20AB is a currency symbol…₨ Rupee Sign Unicode says out loud that this is not really one character. U+20A8 carries a compatibility decomposition to U+0052 U+0073 — a capital R and a lowercase s — so put a string through NFKC and the sign…🕯️ Candle This one did not come from a phone. U+1F56F entered Unicode 7.0 by way of Michel Suignard's study of the Wingdings and Webdings fonts, L2/11-052 — the pass that brought a swathe of Microsoft's…🧊 Ice Someone asked for an iceberg and got an ice cube. The document behind U+1F9CA is L2/18-111, titled "Proposal for a New Emoji: Iceberg" and written by Michael Gubik and Tom Moore; what the standard…🦪 Oyster Look at where it was filed and you learn what Unicode thinks it is. U+1F9AA sits in Animals & Nature, in the marine-animal subgroup, and its CLDR keywords are diving, oyster and pearl — not a food…