Small Left Curly Bracket

It opens a grouped span and pairs with ﹜.

﹛ is a small compatibility form of {, the ordinary left brace. Together with the matching small right brace, it serves the same grouping role in text.

Work on the Chinese character encoding standard CNS 11643 began in 1980; the standard was formally promulgated in 1986. It preserved distinctions used by older character sets during text exchange. In technical writing, ordinary curly braces group code and mathematical expressions; this character carries that opening-brace role.

Why is this brace smaller?

Its small form preserves a legacy encoding distinction.

Unicode includes it among small forms provided for compatibility with CNS 11643, a Chinese character encoding standard. The small punctuation forms occupy fullwidth display cells, and this character’s compatibility mapping is the ordinary {.

Depending on the font, ﹛ may look nearly the same size as {. Fonts can draw the reference shape differently, but the character remains a compatibility form even when the visual size difference is slight.