What ㍳ means
A boxed abbreviation for the Latin letters AU.
In East Asian typography, a box lets a short Latin label occupy the same one-character square as the surrounding writing. Unicode retains these forms for compatibility with older East Asian character sets.
Is ㍳ the astronomical unit symbol?
No; the standard symbol is lowercase au.
In its 2012 Resolution B2, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) selected lowercase au as the astronomical unit's unique symbol. This character's compatibility mapping is uppercase AU.
Compatibility normalization can turn ㍳ into plain AU, removing the square.
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ㍳ 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
10
How to type or find ㍳
- Search it as
- boxed AU · AU character · astronomical unit symbol · square abbreviation
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.