Squared 中

It is 中, “centre”, boxed to label a baseball centre fielder. The character inside is one of the most common in Chinese and Japanese: it means middle or inside, appears in the name of China (中国, literally “middle country”) and, in Japanese, is read chū or naka.

Japanese baseball shortens fielding positions to a single character: 左, 中 and 右 are left, centre and right field, and 中 stands for 中堅手, the centre fielder. On a scorecard the same player is number 8. In a square, the character becomes a compact label for broadcast graphics.

The square comes from the symbol set of Japanese digital broadcasting, which Unicode took over in 2009 as the “Enclosed Ideographic Supplement”. Its neighbours include the other outfield marks 🈬 and 🈮. Unlike a few of its neighbours, 🈭 never became an emoji, so it has no colourful picture and no emoji keyboard entry.

Outside Japanese sports graphics you will rarely meet it. If it reaches you in a message, the sender is probably talking about baseball, copied it from a symbol list, or meant the plain word 中 and picked the boxed one by accident.