What 北 means
It preserves a Taiwan source form during text conversion.
CNS 11643-1992, Taiwan's standard for encoding Chinese text, lists it as T6-2249 in Plane 6. That numbered section includes rare characters and variants recorded by Taiwan's Ministry of Education. Unicode gave such entries separate codes so converters can move text between the standards without losing which source character was used.
Questions people ask
1Will Unicode normalization keep 北?
No. Canonical normalization changes it to 北, so the distinct source code does not survive.
How to type 北
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 2F82B, then Alt+X to get 北.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “cjk compatibility ideograph-2f82b”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 2f82b, then Enter or Space.
HTML
北CSS
\2F82BCodes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
北
HTML hex
北
CSS content
content: "\2F82B";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%AF%A0%AB
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.