What ｿ means
Use your Japanese IME’s Half-width Katakana conversion.
As of 2026, Microsoft IME assigns F8 to half-width conversion; macOS offers a Control-Shift-Semicolon shortcut when that input mode is enabled.
Why is ｿ narrower than ソ?
It is a legacy width form, not a different syllable.
JIS C 6220 added katakana to Japanese one-byte character coding in 1969. The format was built from ISO 646 and accommodated printer, terminal, and storage limits.
Later two-byte Japanese standards expanded the repertoire. Unicode preserves ｿ as a compatibility form related to ソ by width; its role shifted from saving space to supporting existing text and data.
Will ｿ work in Japanese email?
It can fail in older or format-restricted mail paths.
As of 2026, ISO-2022-JP excludes half-width kana, so a converter or mail reader expecting that format may reject or garble ｿ. UTF-8 supports it, but the receiving field may still impose its own rules.
For ordinary Japanese prose, use ソ; reserve ｿ for data or a field that explicitly asks for half-width kana.
For ordinary Japanese prose, use ソ unless the field explicitly requests half-width kana.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
1Does normalization turn ｿ into ソ?
It can. Compatibility normalization removes the half-width distinction; canonical normalization does not. Keep the form required by the receiving system.
How to type ｿ
ｿ\FF7FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.