What ㌬ means
It is a Japanese square ligature caught in a baht-sign encoding mistake. Japanese square ligatures fit katakana strings into one cell. Unicode describes ㌬ as an unused form originally meant for , yet its stored compatibility decomposition is パーツ (“parts”); a Japanese font mapping instead showed バーツ, the katakana spelling of baht.
Why does ㌬ become パーツ or disappear?
Normalization unfolds the box; font support differs. NFKC and NFKD are text-normalization forms that expand ㌬ to パーツ. The mapping mistake was recognized in 2000, after Unicode's character mappings had become stable. In 2016, type specialist Ken Lunde listed Japanese fonts on his computer that lacked a glyph for ㌬ and others that included one; a blank means the font cannot draw it.
Related characters
2
パーツ Unicode's compatibility decomposition of ㌬; NFKC and NFKD expand the box into this katakana word for “parts.”
Questions people ask
1Why does ㌬ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Compatibility block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
8
How to type or find ㌬
- Search it as
- paatu · patsu · parts · baht sign · Thai baht sign · 332c
- 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.