What 󠅣 means
On its own, VS116 selects no particular glyph.
An ideographic variation selector is an invisible formatting character. Placed immediately after a CJK ideograph—a Han character used in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean writing—it forms an ideographic variation sequence (IVS). A pair registered in the Unicode Ideographic Variation Database (IVD) can request a particular subset of glyph forms for that character while leaving its identity unchanged. “116” is not a style code.
Proposals for ideographic variation selectors appeared in 2003 because scholars, governments, and publishers needed distinct ideograph variants, and no single universal list could serve them all. The IVD allows separate collections to register such pairs, giving each registered sequence a stable meaning in text exchange.
Why is variation selector 116 invisible?
It has no visible mark of its own.
If someone sends VS116 alone, it carries no readable text or reaction. A renderer that does not support a selector pair may ignore it and show the base ideograph in its default form.
Technical text formatting: ideographic selectors specify glyph forms within registered pairs, not mood or emphasis.
Unregistered pairs have no stable meaning for text interchange.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1️ VS16 (U+FE0F) is for emoji/text presentation; VS116 is for registered ideographic glyph variants. They belong to different selector systems.
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Does VS116 have a registered IVS?
No. The 2026-08-03 version of the IVD sequence file contains no registered sequence using UE0163, so VS116 identifies no particular glyph variant for text interchange.
More like this
8
How to type or find 󠅣
- Also called
- VS116 · ideographic variation selector
- Search it as
- e0163 · ivs · ideographic variation
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
󠅣\E0163󠅣 in HTML source to encode the character.\U000E0163 in a Python string. Python's uppercase \U escape takes eight hex digits, which can represent this supplementary-plane character.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.