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.
💔 A single character that looks like two things joined, and is not The broken heart is one codepoint. The burning heart next to it on the keyboard is four. Telling them apart matters the moment text has to be cut, counted or searched.💙 The heart Unicode's own FAQ reaches for when it needs an example U+1F499 carries six cross-references, more than any other heart in the block — and Unicode's emoji FAQ picks it to illustrate what happens when a colour word gets baked into a character name.🖤 The one heart Unicode tells vendors what colour to draw The standard almost never dictates colour. On U+1F5A4 the chart annotation says the character is unequivocally black in all variants — and it means all of them.⭐ Named white, drawn gold, and absent from 1.7 million characters of text The star behind every five-star rating did not appear once in the corpus measured for this page. Rating stars are drawn, not typed.★ Two named entities, and the one everybody guesses is the other star ★ is the filled star. ☆ is the hollow one. The two characters are a matched pair and their entity names are not.¢ The key that ASCII deleted It had its own typewriter key. Then a 1960s character table left it out, and the writing convention followed the keyboard.🦨 Skunk Unicode's emoji proposal archive lists two documents against this animal, L2/14-174 and L2/18-128, four years apart. It was assigned in Unicode 12.0 in 2019. Whatever happened between those two…🛜 Wireless The fan of concentric arcs was doing duty on café windows and router boxes long before it had a codepoint. Proposal L2/21-191 made the case, and the character was assigned in Unicode 15.0 in 2022 —…🔝 Top Arrow An English word baked permanently into a glyph is a strange thing to find in a universal character standard, and there are five of them in a row: BACK, END, ON!, SOON and TOP at U+1F519 to U+1F51D…🌑 New Moon Eight moon phases run from U+1F311 to U+1F318, and this is the first of them: the dark face, no illumination at all. The sequence then waxes through crescent, first quarter and gibbous to the full…🌈 Rainbow Look at the search keywords CLDR attaches to this character and the weather is almost an afterthought. The English list runs gay, genderqueer, glbt, glbtq, lesbian, lgbt, lgbtq, lgbtqia, nature…➕ Plus Formally this is HEAVY PLUS SIGN, and it lives among the dingbats — not in Mathematical Operators, where you would expect a plus to sit. The consequence is not cosmetic. Its general category is So…⚝ Outlined White Star The name undersells it. Unicode's annotation reads "alternative form of the interlaced pentagram (a symbol of Morocco)", and cross-references U+26E5 RIGHT-HANDED INTERLACED PENTAGRAM. So this is not…∨ Logical Or Logicians call it a vee or a disjunction, and both names are recorded as Unicode aliases. It joins two propositions into one that holds if either holds — inclusive or, not the exclusive kind.…₃ Subscript Three Subscript Digit Three Here is the trap that catches people who paste chemical formulae into a database. This character carries a compatibility decomposition — Unicode records it as sub, then 0033 — which means NFKC…🧒 Child "No specified gender" — that annotation, printed in the standard beside this codepoint, is the whole point of the character. It arrived in Unicode 10.0 in 2017 as the middle term of a deliberately…🦴 Bone Two separate proposal documents, L2/17-246 and L2/17-259, took this to the Unicode committee in the same year, and it landed in Unicode 11.0 in 2018. What the glyph settled on is the cartoon shape…🦫 Beaver Proposal L2/19-110 put this animal in front of the Unicode committee, and it was assigned in Unicode 13.0 in 2020 — recent enough that a phone left un-updated since 2019 shows a blank box instead.…🦗 Cricket English hands this word to two entirely different things, and Unicode encodes both. This is the insect — CLDR files it under grasshopper and Orthoptera, the order it belongs to. The sport has its own…😽 Kissing Cat Seven cat faces occupy U+1F63A to U+1F640, and they are not a random set — each one shadows a human smiley. Grinning, heart-eyes, wry smile, kissing, crying, pouting, weary: the cat row was encoded…🏀 Basketball All three of the old Japanese mobile carriers shipped this one — DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank each had a code for it before Unicode did. That is a decent proxy for how ordinary a pictograph was in…♑ Capricorn No sign in the set gives a reader more trouble at small sizes. The mark is a loop trailing into a tail, and the usual telling is that it fuses a goat's horn with a fish's tail — Capricorn being the…♎ Libra Eleven of the twelve signs are living things — ram, bull, twins, crab, lion, maiden, scorpion, archer, sea-goat, water-bearer, fish. This one is a balance beam. That makes Libra the odd entry in the…♈ Aries Two curves meeting at a point: a pair of ram's horns, or on another reading the animal's head seen head-on. Unicode makes the connection official rather than leaving it to folklore — the standard…