What ㎤ means
It means cubic centimetres, packed into one character cell. The square is a layout frame; the raised ³ marks volume. Compatibility normalization, a text conversion, can expand ㎤ to cm³ without changing the unit.
The compact form follows East Asian full-width typography. In Japanese, cm³ is preferred in horizontal technical prose; a full-width unit character is mainly suited to vertical composition. Japan’s 1909 metrology revision added cc as a unit abbreviation; that dates cc, not this exact glyph.
Use cm³ in ordinary horizontal prose; ㎤ is the full-width, one-cell form.
The frame does not mean area; the raised ³ marks volume.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ㎤ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Compatibility block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
10
How to type or find ㎤
- Search it as
- cm3 · cm³ · cc · cm^3 · cubic centimeter · cubic centimetre · volume unit · ㎤
- 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.