What ㌿ means
It writes “hon,” the Japanese form of “phon.”
Phon is a unit of perceived loudness level; a 1938 account describes it as an international unit imported from Germany. Japan also used hon as a distinct legal unit for noise levels; those labels changed to decibels in October 1997. Unicode maps ㌿ to ordinary Katakana ホン. NFKC, a text-normalization mode that folds compatibility forms together, can replace the boxed symbol with ホン.
Technical notation for the Japanese spelling of a loudness measure.
The phon loudness unit and Japan’s older noise-level hon were distinct measures despite sharing a name.
Questions people ask
1Why does ㌿ 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 ㌿
- Search it as
- phon · phon unit · loudness level · Japanese noise unit · dB
- 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.