What ⁼ means
⁼ is an equals sign whose raised position belongs to the character itself. It does not raise the next letter, number, or operator.
A 1992 character-set reference, RFC 1345, lists =S as a short text label for ⁼, alongside other raised operators. Unicode keeps characters like this for round-trip conversion: converting older text into Unicode and back can preserve the raised form. In LaTeX, math formatting usually uses ^; for example, x^{=} places = above the baseline as a superscript of x. That formatting does not insert ⁼.
Will text cleanup turn ⁼ into =?
Yes: NFKC normalization changes ⁼ to ordinary =. If a text-cleanup step applies NFKC, it loses the raised placement; without that normalization, displaying the character keeps it raised.
Technical and niche: using ⁼ treats the raised position as text data, not ordinary equation punctuation.
Use ordinary = for an ordinary equation.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions 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.
How to type ⁼
⁼\207CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.