What ⹏ means
It separates one verse from the next. A verse is one unit of a poem. Examples include the 14th-century poem Pascon agan Arluth (“The Passion of Our Lord”), the 1504 play Beunans Meriasek (“The Life of St Meriasek”), Bewnans Ke (“The Life of St Ke”), written around 1500 and preserved in a copy from the second half of the 16th century, and the 1611 play Gwryans an Bÿs (“The Creation of the World”).
The clearest early form has two slanting strokes flanked by angled dots; scribes sometimes drew the strokes horizontally. Glasney, a Cornish scriptorium (a writing center for scribes), is a possible origin. In 2018, “Medieval Cornish Verse Separator” became “Cornish Verse Divider” because some manuscript dates extended beyond the usual medieval period.
A specialist divider for Cornish verse transcription.
Use it for the verse break, not as a general slash or paragraph mark.
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.
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How to type or find ⹏
- Search it as
- verse separator · Cornish punctuation
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⹏\2E4FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.