Parenthesized Ideograph Six

It labels the sixth entry with 六 inside parentheses. In a list, read it as six set apart as an item marker.

Its documented history is typographic. Unicode’s block documentation lists the 1990 edition of JIS X 0208, a Japanese character-set standard, CNS 11643, a Taiwanese standard, and company character registries as sources for parenthesized ideographs. Unicode compatibility characters let existing text standards preserve enclosed forms through conversion and restoration. By June 1992, RFC 1345 listed ㈥ under the name “PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH SIX” with mnemonic 6c.

How do I type ㈥?

Use Unicode hex input for ㈥; write (六) as editable text. The exact input shortcut depends on your device or editor.

Why does ㈥ turn into (六)? A compatibility conversion expands the single character into a left parenthesis, 六, and a right parenthesis. The three-character version keeps the same reading but no longer preserves the one-character form.

Japanese transcription guidance from 2023 recommends decomposing enclosed forms into text with full-width parentheses, as in （六）. Fonts can draw ㈥ with different proportions or strokes; Unicode 17.0 says its reference glyph shapes are not prescriptive. Unicode CLDR 47 lists (六) as the NFKC compatibility fallback, so that normalization can erase the compact distinction.