Source: Noto Sans

U+2042 Asterism

U+2042 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 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 glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+2042 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.

The CLDR project calls this character “asterism” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: dinkus, stars.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

In typography, an asterism, ⁂, is a typographic symbol consisting of three asterisks placed in a triangle, which is used for a variety of purposes. The name originates from the astronomical term for a group of stars.
The asterism was originally used as a type of dinkus in typography, though increasingly rarely. It can also be used to mean "untitled" or author or title withheld – as seen, for example, in some editions of Album for the Young by composer Robert Schumann (№ 21, 26, and 30). In meteorology, an asterism in a station model indicates moderate snowfall.

Representations

System	Representation
Nº	8258
UTF-8	E2 81 82
UTF-16	20 42
UTF-32	00 00 20 42
URL-Quoted	%E2%81%82
HTML hex reference	⁂
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake	â‚
Encoding: EUC_JIS_2004 (hex bytes)	AC FE
Encoding: EUC_JISX0213 (hex bytes)	AC FE
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)	81 36 A8 36
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2004 (hex bytes)	1B 24 28 51 2C 7E 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_3 (hex bytes)	1B 24 28 4F 2C 7E 1B 28 42
Encoding: SHIFT_JIS_2004 (hex bytes)	86 FC
Encoding: SHIFT_JISX0213 (hex bytes)	86 FC
Adobe Glyph List	asterism

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property	Value
Age (age)	1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na)	ASTERISM
Unicode 1 Name (na1)	—
Block (blk)	General Punctuation
General Category (gc)	Other Punctuation
Script (sc)	Common
Bidirectional Category (bc)	Other Neutral
Combining Class (ccc)	Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt)	none
Decomposition Mapping (dm)	Asterism
Lowercase (Lower)	✘
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc)	Asterism
Lowercase Mapping (lc)	Asterism
Uppercase (Upper)	✘
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc)	Asterism
Uppercase Mapping (uc)	Asterism
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc)	Asterism
Titlecase Mapping (tc)	Asterism
Case Folding (cf)	Asterism
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)	✘
Alphabetic (Alpha)	✘
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)	✘
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)	✘
Composition Exclusion (CE)	✘
Case Ignorable (CI)	✘
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)	✘
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)	✘
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)	✘
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)	✘
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)	✘
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)	✘
Cased (Cased)	✘
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)	✘
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)	✘
Dash (Dash)	✘
Deprecated (Dep)	✘
Diacritic (Dia)	✘
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)	✘
Emoji Component (EComp)	✘
Emoji Modifier (EMod)	✘
Emoji Presentation (EPres)	✘
Emoji (Emoji)	✘
Extender (Ext)	✘
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)	✘
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC)	Asterism
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB)	Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)	✔
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)	✘
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)	✘
Hex Digit (Hex)	✘
Hyphen (Hyphen)	✘
ID Continue (IDC)	✘
ID Start (IDS)	✘
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)	✘
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)	✘
IDSU (IDSU)	0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue)	0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start)	0
Ideographic (Ideo)	✘
InCB (InCB)	None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)	—
Indic Positional Category (InPC)	NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC)	Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)	—
Join Control (Join_C)	✘
Logical Order Exception (LOE)	✘
Modifier Combining Mark (MCM)	✘
Math (Math)	✘
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)	✘
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC)	Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC)	Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF)	Asterism
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC)	Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF)	Asterism
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC)	Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)	✘
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)	✘
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)	✘
Other ID Continue (OIDC)	✘
Other ID Start (OIDS)	✘
Other Lowercase (OLower)	✘
Other Math (OMath)	✘
Other Uppercase (OUpper)	✘
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)	✘
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)	✔
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)	✘
Quotation Mark (QMark)	✘
Regional Indicator (RI)	✘
Radical (Radical)	✘
Sentence Break (SB)	Other
Soft Dotted (SD)	✘
Sentence Terminal (STerm)	✘
Terminal Punctuation (Term)	✘
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)	✘
Variation Selector (VS)	✘
Word Break (WB)	Other
White Space (WSpace)	✘
XID Continue (XIDC)	✘
XID Start (XIDS)	✘
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)	✘
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)	✘
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)	✘
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)	✘
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb)	Asterism
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt)	None
East Asian Width (ea)	neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst)	Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)	—
Joining Group (jg)	No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt)	Non Joining
Line Break (lb)	Alphabetic
Numeric Type (nt)	none
Numeric Value (nv)	not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf)	Asterism
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo)	U