What ㏎ means
Capital KM in a square cell; not square kilometres.
It was made for fixed-width East Asian text, where every character occupies a same-width cell, so capital KM could line up with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing. Unicode names older Korean and Japanese character sets and CNS 11643, a Chinese character-set standard, among the sources for this family of square Latin abbreviations.
For the standard SI spelling of kilometre, use lowercase km. ㏎ is a compatibility character, not the standard written form of the unit.
A legacy unit label designed for fixed-width East Asian typography.
The square is a frame; it does not turn kilometres into an area.
Drift: As of 2026, Unicode guidance favors styling ordinary letters in a square cell when available; ㏎ mainly preserves older character data.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
1Why does ㏎ 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.
How to type ㏎
㏎\33CECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.