What ㌋ means
㌋ writes the Japanese name kairi in one compact sign. A nautical mile is a navigation distance tied to a minute of latitude, a useful scale on sea charts.
Where does ㌋ come from?
The nautical-mile unit predates this compact sign. An 1826 sea-route map from Japan's Edo period, before the modern era, uses 里 for distance. Japan formalized 海里 as the nautical-mile term in 1872, and the international value was standardized in 1929. The older 里 was a broader distance unit; 海里 became the term for distances at sea and in the air.
Questions people ask
1Can ㌋ turn into カイリ?
Yes. Unicode defines カイリ as ㌋'s compatibility decomposition. Compatibility normalization, a text process that expands compatibility forms, can replace the compact sign with three ordinary kana; the unit's meaning stays the same.
More like this
9
How to type or find ㌋
- Search it as
- nm symbol · kairi · 海里 · カイリ · nautical mile sign · Japanese nautical 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.