What ㎿ means
Use U+33BF in a Unicode-aware input method. The square MW character is one text character; typing M and W makes the ordinary two-letter unit. If your font lacks ㎿, use MW when the one-cell form is unnecessary.
Why was ㎿ made?
It fits MW into one East Asian text cell. A documented computer-era form appears in Korea's 1987 KS C 5601 character set, where a full-width MW entry maps to ㎿. The wider square-abbreviation family was carried in East Asian legacy character standards to fit Latin abbreviations into fixed-width grids.
Japanese layout guidance treats full-width unit symbols as mainly suited to vertical composition. The IEC unit style guide uses MW, so use MW in new technical prose and reserve ㎿ for legacy data or a layout that needs one full-width cell.
Why does ㎿ turn into MW?
Compatibility normalization expands it to ordinary letters. Unicode defines ㎿ as a compatibility form of M followed by W. NFKC or NFKD normalization can replace it with those letters, keeping the unit's meaning but removing its one-cell form.
Technical and archival; use it when a legacy record or one-cell layout calls for the square form.
It means MW, not MWh.
Don't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
1Will normalization change ㎿ to MW?
Yes. NFKC or NFKD can replace it with the letters MW, preserving the unit but removing the one-cell form.
How to type ㎿
㎿\33BFCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.