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￭

halfwidth black square

Halfwidth Black Square

￭ is a narrow black square form kept for mixed-width East Asian text. It preserves a width distinction while keeping the same solid-square design.

Text symbol
Search it as
narrow black square · U+FFED · FFED · mixed-width text symbol · black square progress bar
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ￭ means

It keeps a solid block available when text calls for a narrow character cell.

Some older systems encoded basic Latin characters in one byte (a small unit of data) but used two-byte codes for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. To preserve existing mixed-width text during conversion, Unicode keeps certain characters in narrow and wide compatibility forms. Japan’s JIS X 0201, published in 1969, is one example of the single-byte side of those systems.

A December 2024 example uses repeated ￭ as filled units in a halfwidth black square progress bar, with ･ marking the remaining units.

Technical and neutral: it reads as a solid block, while its distinctive job is text width.

Don't confuse it with

1
■
Black Square
Halfwidth black square vs black square: ■ is the ordinary-width form; ￭ is the narrow-width form. A font can make them look alike even when their text widths differ.

Questions people ask

1

Why does halfwidth black square look different?

Because “halfwidth” names a width class, not an exact pixel ratio. Fonts and line layout determine the drawn size, so ￭ may not appear exactly half as wide as ■.

How to type ￭

Windows (Word)
Alt+XType FFED, then Alt+X to get ￭.
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 “halfwidth black square”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType ffed, then Enter or Space.
HTML
￭
CSS
\FFED
How do I type halfwidth black square?
In a character table, search by the name or U+FFED. The code identifies this exact narrow form even if your font draws it unclearly.
Japanese IME
As of 2026, Microsoft’s Windows Japanese IME width modes switch kana (Japanese syllabic characters) or alphanumerics; choose the square from IME Pad’s character list.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
￭
HTML hex
￭
CSS content
content: "\FFED";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EF%BF%AD
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Chinese, Japanese & Korean121,370 symbols

ᄀᄁᄂᄃᄄᄅᄆᄇᄈᄉᄊᄋ