What means
It marks a character that the source no longer lets readers recover. Khitan small script was developed in the 10th century to write the Khitan language; surviving examples include carved stone epitaphs—memorial inscriptions for the dead—where damage can hide a character. The box is a transcriber's placeholder, not a historical Khitan word.
A 2023 Unicode proposal gave this placeholder a Khitan-specific code point so it could take part in the script's character clusters. Unicode's 18.0 core specification says the box may change width or height with its place in a cluster.
A scholarly transcription marker for damaged or unreadable Khitan text.
It marks a gap, not a Khitan word to pronounce.
Part of the collection
Who writes
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Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does show as a box on some devices?
It is recent: Unicode added it in version 16.0 (2024), and phones and computers whose fonts are older than that have nothing to draw it with. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- khitan blank marker · khitan transcription box · missing character symbol · lost character marker
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𘳿\18CFFCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.