What ⟬ means
An extra, distinctive pair of brackets for mathematical notation. A tortoise-shell bracket is a bracket with short flat ends and slanted corners, like the outline of a shell. "White" means it is drawn hollow, with a doubled stroke.
Maths quickly runs out of brackets: ( ), [ ], { } and ⟨ ⟩ each already have jobs. The white brackets ⟦⟧, ⟪⟫ and ⟬⟭ give authors more pairs that stay visibly different, so they can mark a special kind of grouping or an operator of their own. Its meaning is whatever the author defines; the bracket itself only says "this span belongs together".
Is it the same as 〘?
No, they are separate characters. 〘 is a punctuation mark from Chinese and Japanese typography, built to fill a full square character cell. ⟬ is its narrow counterpart, sized to sit beside Latin letters and digits in a formula. Use ⟬⟭ in maths and 〘〙 in East Asian text; mixing them breaks search and spacing.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
2Does ⟬ have one fixed mathematical meaning?
No. It has no universal meaning; each author defines what the bracket marks, usually stating it where the notation is introduced.
Why does it show as a box?
Your font lacks it. Maths fonts such as Cambria Math or STIX Two include it.
More like this
10
How to type or find ⟬
- Also called
- white tortoise shell bracket · math tortoise shell bracket
- Search it as
- tortoise shell bracket · math bracket · hollow bracket · ⟬⟭ · double bracket
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⟬\27ECCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.