Medium Right Curly Bracket Ornament

A closing curly bracket drawn as a decoration, not a working brace.

❵ belongs to a small set of ornamental brackets: parentheses, angle brackets, tortoise-shell brackets and curly brackets redrawn as typographic ornaments in light, medium and heavy weights. People use them where ordinary punctuation looks too plain: around a nickname in a profile, a line in a signature, a heading on a poster or an invitation, or a short word they want to set off in a message. The pair ❴ ❵ is the natural form; a lone ❵ usually just means someone copied one half.

It carries no standard meaning of its own. If someone sends ❵, they are most likely decorating, and the right reaction is to read the words inside the frame. Because it is a text character, its exact curve depends on the font: some fonts give it a pronounced swell, others keep it close to a bold }.

Why is it a separate character from }?

It comes from a printer's ornament font and was encoded to match it.

The Dingbats block is Unicode's home for the symbols of ITC Zapf Dingbats, a widely used font of check marks, stars, scissors and pointing hands designed by Hermann Zapf. The font also contained a set of 14 bracket ornaments, but they were left out of Unicode's first mapping of the font in 1991. In 2002 (Unicode 3.2) they were added as a run of their own inside the Dingbats block, ❨ to ❵, so that text set in that font could be converted without losing characters. That is why a curly bracket sits among scissors and pencils.

Unicode does treat ❵ as a closing bracket: it is classed as closing punctuation and paired with ❴, so text that mixes right-to-left scripts can mirror it correctly. But that is as far as the kinship with } goes. To programming languages and data formats it is a completely different character: put it where code needs a closing brace and the program breaks, although inside quoted text it is just another character. In a password it can be hard to retype on another device. For anything that has to work as a brace, use the plain } on your keyboard.