Fullwidth Latin Small Letter H

It is the Latin h in a full-width cell.

ｈ is wider than h because its width is encoded in a separate character, not produced only by a font effect. The fullwidth h fills a square display cell, which lets Latin letters line up with many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.

These forms belong to a computer-era compatibility set: older East Asian character encodings kept full-width and ordinary-width Latin forms for interchange. Japanese-language word processing was developing in 1977–78: Sharp made a prototype in 1977, and Toshiba announced the JW-10 in 1978. In Japanese, the full-width form is called zenkaku and the narrower form hankaku.

Why can ｈ fail where h works?

Because the width is encoded in the character.

Unicode compatibility normalization—a text cleanup some software uses—can convert ｈ to h. Software that compares the original text literally can still treat them as different characters.

That is why ｈ may fail in forms, logins, code, or URLs that expect ordinary-width or ASCII letters. Follow the field’s stated format; use plain h unless full-width input is requested.

What does ｈ signal in a message?

Read it as the letter h; its width may be stylistic.

Among Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text, it can keep Latin letters aligned to a full-width cell. Repeated in Latin-only titles, wide letters can give a line a retro-computer look. A lone ｈ may be an input-mode slip or a deliberate spacing choice; the surrounding text is the clue.