What 🈑 means
No. It means captions exist for that programme, not that they are showing. Viewers turn the text on or off with the remote, so the listing simply promises it is there.
Japanese TV schedules squeeze a programme's services into single kanji in little boxes or brackets. 字 (ji, “written character”) stands for 字幕放送, jimaku hōsō, “caption broadcasting”: text for dialogue, narration and sound cues, aimed at people who cannot hear the audio but useful to anyone watching with the sound down. Its siblings can sit beside it: 解 for audio description, 手 for sign-language interpretation, 二 for a bilingual broadcast, 再 for a rerun, 新 for a new series, 終 for the final episode and 生 for a live broadcast. Japanese broadcasters caption a large share of their programmes, so 🈑 is one of the marks you see most often.
The box is not decoration. Unicode encoded this and the other listing marks in 2009 from the symbol set of ARIB STD-B24, the data-broadcasting standard of Japanese digital television, so they could travel as ordinary text rather than private codes. Some of its neighbours, such as (free of charge) and (reserved), later became emoji; 🈑 did not.
What does it mean when someone sends 🈑?
Usually nothing beyond “captions”. It has no established slang reading, tone or hidden joke. If it arrives in a message, a Japanese friend may be noting that a show or video comes with subtitles, or someone may simply be pasting a block of unusual symbols. Read it literally and move on.
A neutral broadcast-service label, like the CC badge on a remote: informative, never emotional.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- A dense Japanese newspaper listing line can read like a cipher, with 新 字 二 解 stacked before the title: new, captioned, bilingual, with audio description.
- Unicode got 🈑 from a broadcasting standard, not from a phone maker, which is why it never joined the emoji set while its neighbour did.
Questions people ask
3Is 🈑 an emoji?
No. It is a plain text symbol that was never added to the emoji list, so emoji keyboards usually don't offer it and it typically draws in the text font, not as a colourful picture.
Why does 🈑 show as an empty box or question mark?
The font on that device has no glyph for it. Many systems with Japanese fonts show it, but Japanese support alone doesn't guarantee this rarer symbol.
Does 🈑 appear on the TV screen during the show?
Usually not. The box lives in schedules and the on-screen programme guide; during the show some channels flash a short caption notice, and you see the captions themselves if you turned them on.
More like this
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How to type or find 🈑
- Also called
- caption mark · jimaku mark · 字幕放送 mark
- Search it as
- closed captions · cc · subtitles · japanese tv symbol · 字幕 · boxed 字 · square ji · tv listing mark
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🈑\1F211Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.