Braille Pattern Dots-7

It has no universal standalone meaning. The Braille code around it determines whether it marks a letter or something else. Traditional literary Braille uses six dots; dot 7 lies in the added bottom row of eight-dot Braille.

Charles Barbier developed military “night writing,” a raised-dot code intended to let soldiers communicate silently in darkness. Louis Braille adapted it into a smaller six-dot cell in France in the 1820s and published his code in 1829. Later, eight-dot systems added a bottom row for computer text, mathematics, music, and technical notation.

Where does ⡀ show up in practice?

In terminal graphics, it can work as a pixel. A Braille character can encode a 2-by-4 pixel cell; in ⡀, only the lower-left pixel is lit. A stream built this way is an image, not necessarily text to read as Braille.

On a refreshable Braille display or in an eight-dot computer code, dot 7 may be added to another character to mark a capital or another display attribute. The code determines that use, so ⡀ alone does not mean “capital.”