What ﾲ means
It is a halfwidth compatibility form of Korean ㅂ.
It represents the same consonant, not a different sound or a complete syllable. In fixed-pitch East Asian text, it was intended to take one display cell in a mixed-width stream, though the actual display depends on the font and layout. ㅂ is its spacing compatibility-jamo counterpart; ᄇ is the conjoining initial jamo. Use ㅂ in ordinary Korean writing, and keep ﾲ when the legacy-width form matters.
why was this halfwidth form made?
It supported older Korean text encodings with mixed character widths.
The earliest standard evidence for this family is the 1974 KS C 5601 N-byte Hangul scheme. It assigned basic Korean jamo using a variable-length 7-bit code so Korean letters could coexist with ASCII-like data and other national or vendor code arrangements.
The later halfwidth range follows that layout and appears in Korean IBM mappings such as code page 933. Unicode's code chart retains ﾲ as the narrow counterpart of ㅂ for compatibility conversion. Its role shifted from an encoding slot to a form that preserves older text when needed.
How do I keep the exact form?
Avoid compatibility normalization when the width distinction matters.
NFKC and NFKD remove compatibility distinctions and can turn ﾲ into ᄇ. If your editor offers Unicode code-point entry, enter FFB2 and check that the result is still ﾲ. For ordinary Korean text, use ㅂ instead.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
2Why did ﾲ change when I normalized it?
Compatibility normalization removes the halfwidth distinction. NFKC and NFKD turn it into the conjoining jamo ᄇ; preserve the original text if that distinction must remain.
Is ﾲ a complete Korean syllable?
No. It is a single consonant letter. A Korean syllable needs other Hangul components or a precomposed syllable.
How to type ﾲ
ﾲ\FFB2Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.