What ㌁ means
It spells “alpha” in Japanese Katakana. The ordinary spelling is アルファ; ㌁ packs that word into one square text cell.
These squared forms let a Katakana word occupy one display cell alongside Japanese kanji. Unicode keeps them for compatibility with older East Asian character sets. Unicode Standard 18.0 says that when layout software can place any Katakana word inside one square cell, that styling is preferred to a fixed list of prebuilt characters.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ㌁ 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 ㌁
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 3301, then Alt+X to get ㌁.
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 “square aruhua”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 3301, then Enter or Space.
HTML
㌁CSS
\3301Unicode character search
Search U+3301 in a Unicode character picker, or locate it by code point in your system character map.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
㌁
HTML hex
㌁
CSS content
content: "\3301";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E3%8C%81
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.