What ⅷ means
It is a compact, single-character form of the Roman numeral VIII.
The numeral tradition behind it belongs to a wider family used by ancient Greeks and Etruscans, an ancient people of the Italian peninsula, around 600–500 BCE. Roman numerals later spread widely through medieval Europe.
In books, lowercase Roman numerals often number front matter—the pages before the main text, such as the contents and preface—while Arabic numerals begin the main text.
When should I use ⅷ rather than viii?
Use viii in prose; reserve ⅷ for vertical layouts.
Unicode encoded the dedicated form for compatibility with East Asian standards. It stays upright in vertical text, while sequences of Latin letters can be laid out differently.
Compatibility normalization (NFKC), a text cleanup used by some systems, changes ⅷ to viii. If a document depends on one character, that process can erase the distinction.
Formal and typographic, at home in numbered page labels and specialized layouts.
Part of the collection
Who writes ⅷ
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Don't confuse it with
1viii The same value written with four Latin letters; each letter can be selected and edited separately.
Questions people ask
1Why does ⅷ 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.
More like this
11
Collections with ⅷ
1
How to type or find ⅷ
- Search it as
- viii · roman numeral 8 · lowercase roman numeral · book front matter · roman numeral pagination · chapter numbering
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ⅷ\2177Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.