What ㆝ means
A return mark for Japanese reading order.
㆝ in kanbun reading order starts the 天地人 tier after simpler tiers for swaps, numbers, top/middle/bottom, and first-through-fourth marks. Kanbun is the Japanese reading of classical Chinese; kaeriten (“return marks”) show where to backtrack.
Kunten (“reading notes”) are thought to date to the Nara period; the oldest dated example annotates Buddhist text 成実論 in Tenchō 5 (828). Kaeriten likely grew from proofreading marks; a modern-like system emerged by the end of the 14th century, with conventions standardized in 1912.
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ㆝ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
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How to type or find ㆝
- Search it as
- ㆝ meaning · kaeriten · ㆝ vs 天
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㆝\319DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.