What ㆜ means
It marks the fourth return tier in Japanese kanbun.
Kanbun reading annotations, called kaeriten (“return marks”), guide Japanese readers through Classical Chinese in Japanese word order. The earliest cited Japanese example is a Buddhist text from 788; that dates the practice, not necessarily ㆜ itself. Related kundoku rules—methods for reading Chinese texts in Japanese—were also applied in European-language study in the 18th–19th centuries.
㆜ represents 丁 in the 甲乙丙丁 sequence, a deeper return tier used when simpler marks are not enough. Unicode 17.0.0 describes kanbun marks as special-purpose annotations; without font and layout support, ㆜ may appear too large or be missing.
Technical and scholarly: it belongs to annotated kanbun reading, not everyday conversation.
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ㆜ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Kanbun block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
9
How to type or find ㆜
- Also called
- 丁点
- Search it as
- kaeriten · tei · 返り点 · 返点 · 甲乙丙丁 · kanbun · kundoku
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㆜\319CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.