What ㎾ means
Read it as kilowatt, a unit of power.
Why is ㎾ a square? It gives the Latin letters a full-width cell for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text. A Korean character table centers it in that cell.
A Japanese dictionary dates the loanword キロワット (“kilowatt”) to 1912; that date belongs to the word. Unicode keeps this form for compatibility with older character sets.
Technical unit typography; it labels power, not tone.
The square is a box, not “kilowatt squared.”
Don't confuse it with
1kW
Plain kW uses two Latin letters; ㎾ is one character. Unicode compatibility normalization (NFKC or NFKD) turns it into kW.
Questions 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 ㎾
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 33BE, then Alt+X to get ㎾.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “square kw”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 33be, then Enter or Space.
HTML
㎾CSS
\33BECodes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
㎾
HTML hex
㎾
CSS content
content: "\33BE";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E3%8E%BE
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.