Small Colon

Use your editor’s Unicode input for U+FE55.

Enter U+FE55 with your editor’s Unicode-entry command, or select the character from your operating system’s character map. The ordinary colon key enters : instead. In JavaScript and JSON strings, \uFE55 denotes this character; other programming languages may use different escape syntax.

Why does the small colon look small but take a full East Asian character cell?

The dots shrink; the East Asian layout cell stays full width.

﹕ is a reduced-glyph colon kept for legacy CJK text, including CNS 11643, a character standard. Its small dots sit in a cell the width of a typical East Asian character. The fullwidth colon ： has a larger glyph; ﹕ is the small form inside a wide cell.

An ancestor of the ordinary colon was punctus elevatus, a medieval punctuation mark used at section endings and later for pauses within sentences. It could mark the end of one thought while the sentence continued. The colon later took on syntactic jobs, including introducing explanations and lists.

European-style punctuation entered Japanese print during the Meiji period. CJK typography positions punctuation according to horizontal or vertical layout; Unicode preserves this character as a CNS 11643 compatibility form.