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﹙

small left parenthesis

Small Left Parenthesis

﹙ opens a parenthetical aside, like <code>(</code>. It is a reduced-mark form that still takes a fullwidth East Asian text cell, and NFKC normalization can turn it into ordinary <code>(</code>.

Text symbol
Search it as
fe59 · u+fe59 · small parenthesis · small paren · cns 11643 · fullwidth parenthesis · vertical parenthesis · compatibility punctuation
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ﹙ means

It opens a parenthetical aside, like (.

It is one of the reduced punctuation variants encoded for compatibility with CNS 11643, a Chinese character-set standard.

Why does it look small but take a fullwidth cell?

The mark is reduced; its East Asian text cell is fullwidth.

That is a layout distinction, not a second punctuation meaning.

Don't confuse it with

4
﹚
Small Right Parenthesis
shares “parenthesis”, “small”
﹐
Small Comma
shares “small”
﹑
Small Ideographic Comma
shares “small”
﹒
Small Full Stop
shares “small”

Questions people ask

1

Can ﹙ become the ordinary parenthesis?

Yes. NFKC compatibility normalization maps ﹙ to ordinary `(`, preserving the punctuation role but not the exact character.

How to type ﹙

Windows (Word)
Alt+XType FE59, 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 left parenthesis”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType fe59, then Enter or Space.
HTML
&#xFE59;
CSS
\FE59
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
&#65113;
HTML hex
&#xFE59;
CSS content
content: "\FE59";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EF%B9%99
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.

Families this belongs to

1

Typography & punctuation332 symbols

‼️❗⁉️❓❔❕〰️!"#%&