What ﹊ means
It preserves an older overline style for horizontal Chinese text.
The broader overline tradition goes back to Ancient Greek numeral writing, where a horizontal line marked numbers apart from words; one historical account places that practice mainly in Byzantine-period manuscripts. Latin overlines later marked numerals multiplied by a thousand and abbreviations in medieval writing, while mathematics used them to group expressions and mark repeating decimals. The character-encoding standard CNS 11643 included this styled form among marks for emphasis in horizontal Chinese text.
Why did it change when the text was normalized?
Compatibility normalization changes its stored sequence. It maps ﹊ to a space plus a combining overline. A font draws the visible stroke; without a font that supports this compatibility character, it may appear as a different line or a missing-glyph box.
Should I type it for new text?
Use text styling for new overlines. This character remains for compatibility with older East Asian encodings; Unicode discourages new use when modern text styling can draw the line directly. Keep it in legacy source data that depends on its identity; for fresh text, an overline style is clearer.
A technical legacy mark; its main role is preserving an overline form in older East Asian text.
Do not put it after a word expecting it to overline that word.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Questions people ask
2Can it put a line over a whole word?
No. It is a single spacing character, not markup that reaches backward over a word. Apply an overline style when the line must span text.
Does normalization change this character?
Yes. Compatibility normalization expands ﹊ into a space followed by a combining overline, so the stored sequence changes even if the result looks similar.
More like this
9
Collections with ﹊
2
How to type or find ﹊
- Search it as
- overline · overbar · overscore · spacing overline · CJK overline · compatibility overline · CNS 11643
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
﹊\FE4ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.