U+214C PER SIGN

U+214C was added to Unicode in version 4.1 (2005). It belongs to the block Letterlike Symbols in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. In text U+214C behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

In mathematics, a ratio is a relationship between two numbers of the same kind (e.g., objects, persons, students, spoonfuls, units of whatever identical dimension), expressed as "a to b" or a:b, sometimes expressed arithmetically as a dimensionless quotient of the two that explicitly indicates how many times the first number contains the second (not necessarily an integer).

In layman's terms a ratio represents, for every amount of one thing, how much there is of another thing. For example, supposing one has 8 oranges and 6 lemons in a bowl of fruit, the ratio of oranges to lemons would be 4:3 (which is equivalent to 8:6) while the ratio of lemons to oranges would be 3:4. Additionally, the ratio of oranges to the total amount of fruit is 4:7 (equivalent to 8:14). The 4:7 ratio can be further converted to a fraction of 4/7 to represent how much of the fruit is oranges.