What ㌍ means
It writes the Japanese word “calorie” in a compact square form. The four katakana characters—a Japanese syllabary—are compressed into one full-width sign for fixed-width text. On a nutrition figure, the sign names the unit word but does not choose small calories or kilocalories; read the unit notation around the number.
㌍ appears in JIS X 0208-1983, a Japanese text-character standard, as a compact unit sign. Unicode treats it as a compatibility form, so compatibility normalization such as NFKC or NFKD can replace its boxed shape with ordinary writing.
A compact Japanese unit sign for fixed-width text; its tone is technical rather than conversational.
The box does not tell you cal or kcal; check the unit notation.
Part of the collection
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ㌍ 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.
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10
How to type or find ㌍
- Search it as
- calorie symbol · boxed calorie · ㌍ · カロリー · kcal symbol
- 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.