Small Percent Sign

It means percent; the small shape changes presentation only.

As a fullwidth compatibility variant of ordinary %, ﹪ shares that sign's history. Before a dedicated mark, Italian arithmetic writers used phrases and abbreviations for “per cento” (“per hundred”). An abbreviation written as pc, with a small loop, appears in an Italian arithmetic text from 1425; supplementary pages were probably added around 1435. Around 1650, that form had developed into the fraction-like percent sign.

The percent reading stayed the same while placement conventions varied: English puts % directly after the number, French and SI style use a space, and Turkish places it before the number. These are conventions for the percent sign, not different readings.

Why was ﹪ made?

To preserve a small typographic form in legacy text.

CNS 11643 was announced as Taiwan's national standard in 1986. Unicode includes ﹪ among the small forms of ASCII punctuation for compatibility with older implementations; it preserves a layout distinction, not a new percentage unit.

Although the drawn glyph is small, it occupies a fullwidth display cell. That makes it different from ％, the separate fullwidth percent sign. In vertical text, the layout determines character orientation; ﹪ itself does not request a rotation.