What ㊂ means
It marks the third item in an ordered list. The circle encloses 三, the Chinese-character numeral for three, making a compact text label.
The circled set ㊀–㊉ was originally intended for numbered text bullets. By Unicode 16.0, rich-text list styling had largely replaced that job; the characters remain encoded for compatibility with legacy East Asian character sets and occasional plain-text use.
It reads as compact, typographic list numbering.
If it arrives alone, read it as “item three” before assigning a tone.
Don't confuse it with
1Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Why does ㊂ show as a box?
It can. As of 2026, some Western fonts lack related Japanese circled-number glyphs; if neither the active font nor a fallback can display ㊂, it may appear as a box.
More like this
10
Collections with ㊂
2
How to type or find ㊂
- Search it as
- ㊂ · u+3282 · 3282 · circled three · circled number 3 · circled Chinese numeral three
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㊂\3282Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.