U+238E HYSTERESIS SYMBOL

U+238E was added to Unicode in version 3.0 (1999). It belongs to the block Miscellaneous Technical 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+238E 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:

Hysteresis is the time-based dependence of a system's output on current and past inputs. The dependence arises because the history affects the value of an internal state. To predict its future outputs, either its internal state or its history must be known. If a given input alternately increases and decreases, a typical mark of hysteresis is that the output forms a loop as in the figure.

Such loops may occur purely because of a dynamic lag between input and output. This effect disappears as the input changes more slowly. This effect meets the description of hysteresis given above, but is often referred to as rate-dependent hysteresis to distinguish it from hysteresis with a more durable memory effect.

Hysteresis occurs in ferromagnetic materials and ferroelectric materials, as well as in the deformation of some materials (such as rubber bands and shape-memory alloys) in response to a varying force. In natural systems hysteresis is often associated with irreversible thermodynamic change. Many artificial systems are designed to have hysteresis: for example, in thermostats and Schmitt triggers, the principle of hysteresis is applied to avoid unwanted rapid switching. Hysteresis has been identified in many other fields, including economics and biology.