What 󠅼 means
It asks for a particular written form of a character. An ideographic variation sequence (IVS) pairs a Chinese, Japanese or Korean character with a selector; together, they tell software which form of that character to use.
The Ideographic Variation Database (IVD) lists approved pairs. Its 2026-08-03 listing includes Japan’s Moji_Joho collection, which preserves character forms needed in government administration.
Can I add it after any character?
No: no registered pair uses this selector. The IVD sequence file dated 2026-08-03 contains no pair ending in it, so it cannot select a registered variant. Appending it will not create a new glyph.
Why does it seem to do nothing?
The selector itself has no visible drawing. For invalid or unsupported pairs, Unicode says to show the base character as usual and ignore the selector. The text still contains it.
Part of the collection
Questions people ask
1Why does 󠅼 show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Variation Selectors Supplement block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
8
How to type or find 󠅼
- Search it as
- vs141 · ivs · variation sequence · ideograph variant · glyph variant · invisible character
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
󠅼\E017CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.