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Glyph for U+203B
Source: Noto Sans

U+203B Reference Mark

U+203B was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block U+2000 to U+206F General Punctuation in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as Japanese kome and Urdu paragraph separator.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Ambiguous East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. In text U+203B behaves as Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic) regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The CLDR project labels this character “reference mark” for use in screen reading software.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The reference mark or reference symbol "※" is a typographic mark or word used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) writing.

The symbol was used historically to call attention to an important sentence or idea, such as a prologue or footnote. As an indicator of a note, the mark serves the same purpose as the asterisk in English. However, in Japanese usage, the note text is placed directly into the main text immediately after the reference mark, rather than at the bottom of the page or end of chapter as is the case in English writing.

Representations

System Representation
8251
UTF-8 E2 80 BB
UTF-16 20 3B
UTF-32 00 00 20 3B
URL-Quoted %E2%80%BB
HTML hex reference ※
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ※
alias Japanese kome
alias Urdu paragraph separator
Encoding: EUC-KR (hex bytes) A1 D8
Encoding: JIS0208 (hex bytes) A2 A8
Adobe Glyph List referencemark
digraph :X

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name REFERENCE MARK
Unicode 1 Name
Block General Punctuation
General Category Other Punctuation
Script Common
Bidirectional Category Other Neutral
Combining Class Not Reordered
Decomposition Type None
Decomposition Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Lowercase
Simple Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Uppercase
Simple Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Simple Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Case Folding Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
ASCII Hex Digit
Alphabetic
Bidi Control
Bidi Mirrored
Composition Exclusion
Case Ignorable
Changes When Casefolded
Changes When Casemapped
Changes When NFKC Casefolded
Changes When Lowercased
Changes When Titlecased
Changes When Uppercased
Cased
Full Composition Exclusion
Default Ignorable Code Point
Dash
Deprecated
Diacritic
Emoji Modifier Base
Emoji Component
Emoji Modifier
Emoji Presentation
Emoji
Extender
Extended Pictographic
FC NFKC Closure Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Grapheme Cluster Break Any
Grapheme Base
Grapheme Extend
Grapheme Link
Hex Digit
Hyphen
ID Continue
ID Start
IDS Binary Operator
IDS Trinary Operator and
IDSU 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start 0
Ideographic
InCB None
Indic Mantra Category
Indic Positional Category NA
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Jamo Short Name
Join Control
Logical Order Exception
Math
Noncharacter Code Point
NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Casefold Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKC_SCF Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Other Alphabetic
Other Default Ignorable Code Point
Other Grapheme Extend
Other ID Continue
Other ID Start
Other Lowercase
Other Math
Other Uppercase
Prepended Concatenation Mark
Pattern Syntax
Pattern White Space
Quotation Mark
Regional Indicator
Radical
Sentence Break Other
Soft Dotted
Sentence Terminal
Terminal Punctuation
Unified Ideograph
Variation Selector
Word Break Other
White Space
XID Continue
XID Start
Expands On NFC
Expands On NFD
Expands On NFKC
Expands On NFKD
Bidi Paired Bracket Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Bidi Paired Bracket Type None
East Asian Width Ambiguous
Hangul Syllable Type Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment
Joining Group No_Joining_Group
Joining Type Non Joining
Line Break Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic)
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value not a number
Simple Case Folding Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Script Extension
Vertical Orientation U