What ⠨ means
The code and surrounding cells decide what it means. In UEB, ⠨ opens an italics indicator, while the following cells show which text it covers. BANA's English Braille rules assign the same pattern a different job: decimal point.
Unicode records which dots are raised; it does not give this pattern one meaning shared by every Braille code. To read it, you need the code and the cells around it.
How did the six-dot cell develop?
Charles Barbier, a French military officer, devised a larger raised-dot code for night communication. A reader could feel it without light or speech. The system appeared in 1815 and was demonstrated at the Paris school for blind students in 1821.
Louis Braille reshaped Barbier's system into a six-dot cell by 1824. He published his system in 1829 and revised it in 1837. Braille codes retain this cell structure but assign patterns according to language and notation.
Technical within Braille; on its own, the pattern has no code-independent reading.
Do not treat ⠨ as one universal translation; its code and neighboring cells matter.
Part of the collection
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsStarts an italics indicator; following cells show how far it applies.
Don't confuse it with
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ⠨ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
9
How to type or find ⠨
- Search it as
- Braille dots 46 · dots 4 and 6 Braille · UEB italics indicator · BANA decimal point · Braille decimal separator
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⠨\2828Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.