What ￅ means
It is the narrow form of the Korean vowel ㅒ.
The Korean vowel ㅒ is called “yae.” A commentary published with the 1446 Hunminjeongeum, an early guide to the Korean alphabet, lists it among vowels formed with ㅣ. It remains a regular vowel in modern Korean spelling.
A Unicode proposal in 2017 traced the halfwidth jamo set probably to an annex in the 1987-era KS C 5601 Korean character standard. The narrow forms served a technical purpose: keeping text compatible with older character sets that mixed narrow and full-width characters.
Use ㅒ in ordinary Korean writing
ￅ maps to the spacing Korean letter ㅒ. The related ᅤ is the conjoining form used as a vowel component when Hangul syllables are shaped. They represent the same vowel, but have different roles in text.
Ordinary Korean input methods do not offer a normal way to enter halfwidth jamo. A Unicode proposal in 2017 also reported sparse font coverage for these characters. For regular Korean, type ㅒ or a complete syllable containing it.
Its narrow width points to legacy text encoding or width control, not Korean style or emotion.
Use ㅒ for ordinary Korean: compatibility processing can change ￅ, and some fonts lack it.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
3Does ￅ join into a Korean syllable?
No. It is a spacing compatibility character. The conjoining vowel ᅤ is used as a syllable component, or you can type a complete syllable.
Why does ￅ show as a box?
The font may not contain this character. A missing font glyph can appear as an empty box.
Can I use ￅ in ordinary Korean text?
Usually, use ㅒ or a complete syllable containing it. Keep ￅ for text that needs this specific legacy-width form.
How to type ￅ
ￅ\FFC5Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.