What ⩸ means
Read it as a specialized “is equivalent to” sign.
Equivalence means treating two things as alike under a chosen rule, rather than necessarily saying they are the very same thing. The four dots are part of the sign, not four quantities to count or multiply. For a calculation or proof, use the definition given in the text; the character’s name alone does not specify that definition.
Why give this sign its own character?
A separate character helps preserve mathematical notation in digital text.
A 2000 proposal included ⩸ among mathematical relation signs through STIX, a publisher-backed project for shared mathematical and technical fonts. The aim was to make such notation easier to display and exchange between digital documents. The dots and bars form one character, so they do not have to be assembled separately.
Part of collections
Related characters
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Questions people ask
1Why does ⩸ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Supplemental Mathematical Operators block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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How to type or find ⩸
- Search it as
- four-dot equivalence sign · triple bar with four dots · equivDD
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⩸\2A78Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.