Boxed Inch

It means “inch”: Japanese インチ packed into one square character.

The Japanese spelling is read “inchi” and means inch. ㌅ packs its three katakana letters into a cell about as tall as an ordinary Japanese character. It belongs to a set of compact Japanese word signs preserved for compatibility with older text encodings.

An older Japanese shorthand for inch, 吋, appears in an 1883 example from the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, a Tokyo newspaper. That dates the shorthand, not ㌅, and does not show that one came from the other.

How do I type ㌅?

Enter U+3305 in a Unicode-aware character map or input tool.

Ordinary Japanese text input produces インチ, the three-character spelling, rather than this boxed character.

In ordinary English measurements, write “inch” or “in”; use ㌅ when the compact Japanese form itself matters.

Why does ㌅ turn into インチ?

Compatibility normalization can expand it into ordinary katakana.

Unicode compatibility normalization, such as NFKC or NFKD, can replace ㌅ with インチ. The reading stays the same while the stored text loses the boxed form.

Japanese type can draw compact square words differently in horizontal and vertical layout. If the character is missing, the font lacks its glyph; the empty box is not another meaning.