Variation Selector-106

It requests a defined drawn form of the preceding base character.

Its history is computer-text history. Unicode's 1997 document register records a Plane 14 Variant Tag proposal; the Supplement range entered Unicode 4.0 in 2003. The mechanism was made for plain text that must preserve a particular glyph—for example, a personal or place name, a publisher's glyph, or a historical document—when the ordinary character code alone is too broad. The needs of scholars, governments, and publishers differ, so separate registered collections can serve different communities. A selector number therefore has no fixed cross-character meaning. The isolated mark has no cultural meaning to decode.

Why is Variation Selector-106 invisible?

It has no glyph of its own, so unsupported pairs look unchanged.

It is a nonspacing mark, meaning it does not occupy a visible character cell of its own. In a supported base-plus-selector pair, a font can choose the registered glyph; in an invalid or unsupported pair, the base displays normally and the selector stays invisible. Applications may also ignore selectors during search, parsing, or other text processing. That can make a sequence look as if it vanished even though the underlying text still contains the mark.

Can I use Variation Selector-106 alone?

No. Use it only with a documented base-plus-selector sequence.

Do not paste it after a random character to force a font style. Users cannot define their own variation sequences, and an unregistered ideographic sequence is not intended for text interchange. As of 2026-08-03, the current Ideographic Variation Database (IVD) sequence file contains no entry using E0159, so this selector is not a general-purpose request for a special glyph.