What ㍏ means
It marks a yard, a length unit, in compact Japanese notation. Its word, ヤール, is written in katakana, one of the Japanese syllabaries; it appears especially in cloth measurements.
A chronology of Japanese loanwords records ヤール by 1884, and a Japanese dictionary cites a textile example from 1897. Those dates belong to the word, not to this boxed character.
After Japan completed the shift to metric measures in 1959, ヤール remained in textile terminology; ㍏ is a legacy Japanese unit sign. Vertical Japanese text may use separate layout rules for compact signs. Text software can expand the box to ordinary Katakana, preserving the word but losing its one-cell form.
Questions people ask
1Why does ㍏ 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.
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How to type or find ㍏
- Search it as
- yard symbol · yd · ヤール · yard for cloth
- 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.