What ﹗ means
The punctuation stays exclamatory; only the typographic form is compact. The ordinary ! is also nicknamed a “bang” in English. ﹗ is a compact compatibility variant associated with CNS 11643, a character-encoding standard for Chinese text.
Chinese typesetting guidance sets spacing for repeated exclamation marks and punctuation strings such as !?. Japanese punctuation guides use fullwidth ！ as the ordinary mark. These are layout conventions around exclamation punctuation.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ﹗ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ﹗
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType FE57, then Alt+X to get ﹗.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “small exclamation mark”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType fe57, then Enter or Space.
HTML
﹗CSS
\FE57HTML or XML
In HTML or XML source, write `﹗`; a numeric character reference renders as the exact character ﹗.
Normalization
NFKC turns ﹗ into ordinary ! and removes the compact-form distinction; use ! for new text unless preserving that source form matters.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
﹗
HTML hex
﹗
CSS content
content: "\FE57";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EF%B9%97
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.