What 🈬 means
Left field, the outfield seen on the left from home plate. The kanji 左 (read hidari, “left”) sits in a box, which turns it into a compact tag that fits neatly beside a player's name or a score.
Japanese baseball writing shrinks each fielding position to a single plain kanji, with 左 for left field; in box scores 左安 means a single to left. The boxed version is the broadcast-graphics counterpart of that shorthand.
The symbol comes from Japan's digital-broadcast text standard, ARIB STD-B24, whose character set includes these marks for on-screen graphics. Before Unicode added them in 2009, such marks lived in font-specific codes, so the same code could show different pictures on different computers.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- Many enclosed kanji, such as boxed 新 (a new program series) and 字 (closed-captioned broadcast), entered Unicode from the same Japanese TV standard.
Questions people ask
1Why does 🈬 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.
More like this
11
How to type or find 🈬
- Also called
- boxed left · left field · squared 左
- Search it as
- boxed left kanji · left field symbol · japanese baseball symbol · 左 · arib
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🈬\1F22CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.