What ⁓ means
It repeats a nearby headword. Dictionary entries use it for the main word, or part of it, in compounds and inflected forms. In Uralic linguistic writing, it links forms treated as etymologically or phonetically related; specialist punctuation uses it for alternation.
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, a system for transcribing Uralic languages, shows ⁓ in examples from 1901. The English Little Oxford Dictionary used it for repetition by 1930; Merriam-Webster dates the term’s first known use to 1951.
Specialist punctuation for dictionaries and linguistics.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions 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 ⁓
⁓\2053Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.