This character is a Math Symbol 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+229F forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The CLDR project calls this character “squared minus” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: mathematics, minus, squared, subtraction-like.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The plus sign (+) and the minus sign (−) are mathematical symbols used to denote positive and negative functions, respectively. In addition, + represents the operation of addition, which results in a sum, while − represents subtraction, resulting in a difference. Their use has been extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms meaning "more" and "less", respectively.
The forms ⟨+⟩ and ⟨−⟩ are used in many countries around the word. Other designs include ⟨﬩⟩ for plus and ⟨⁒⟩ for minus.
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
8863
UTF-8
E2 8A 9F
UTF-16
22 9F
UTF-32
00 00 22 9F
URL-Quoted
%E2%8A%9F
HTML hex reference
⊟
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
⊟
HTML named entity
⊟
HTML named entity
⊟
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 36 DE 30
LATEX
\boxminus
RFC 5137
\u'229F'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u229F
C and C++
\u229F
C#
\u229F
CSS
\00229F
Excel
=UNICHAR(8863)
Go
\u229F
JavaScript
\u229F
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{229f}
JSON
\u229F
Java
\u229F
Lua
\u{229F}
Matlab
char(8863)
Perl
"\x{229F}"
PHP
\u{229f}
PostgreSQL
U&'\229F'
PowerShell
`u{229F}
Python
\u229F
Ruby
\u{229f}
Rust
\u{229f}
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