What ㌰ means
It spells ピコ, the Japanese form of the pico prefix.
In the International System of Units (SI), pico means one trillionth ; its symbol p goes before a unit. The SI assigned p to pico in 1960.
Why is ㌰ in a square?
It keeps two Japanese syllable signs together in one cell.
This belongs to a set of squared Japanese katakana (syllable signs) carried over from Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS), where each compact form fit a full-width character cell. Unicode compatibility normalization expands ㌰ to ピコ, dropping the square while retaining the Japanese word.
Technical and typographic, with a legacy feel; it suits Japanese text that preserves older square forms.
Questions people ask
1Why does ㌰ 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.
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How to type or find ㌰
- Search it as
- pico symbol · piko character · pico prefix · Japanese pico · U+3330 · ㌰ Unicode
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㌰\3330Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.