Kharoṣṭhī Punctuation Lines

It is Kharoṣṭhī punctuation; its exact role depends on context.

Kharoṣṭhī is a right-to-left script used for Gāndhārī, Sanskrit, and mixed dialects. Its origin is almost certainly related to Aramaic. The earliest fully developed examples are Aśoka’s inscriptions at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra, around 250 BCE.

Kharoṣṭhī appeared on coins, official records, inscriptions, and Buddhist texts. A first-century CE birch-bark scroll uses large lotus marks and rectangles in the margins to divide sections; that shows the wider punctuation practice, not a fixed translation for 𐩘. Use faded in Gandhāra by the third century CE, but a later Central Asian form, Formal Kharoṣṭhī, continued to write Gāndhārī and Tocharian B into the seventh century CE.

Why does 𐩘 look like a wave?

〰 is a transcriptional stand-in, not this encoded character.

The Unicode Kharoṣṭhī proposal uses 〰 to show how the lines mark can be represented in transcription. It is a comparison sign, not the character itself; the ASCII tilde ~ is separate too.

If 𐩘 appears blank or as a box, the character can still be present: your font may lack a drawing for Kharoṣṭhī. Character support means software recognizes the code point; font support means the typeface can display it.

How do I type 𐩘?

Use a Unicode escape when your keyboard lacks a Kharoṣṭhī layout.

These escapes identify the exact character, but they do not supply a font. When mixed with Latin text, Kharoṣṭhī reads right to left; a bidirectional-text-aware editor helps you check how the two scripts are arranged.