What 󠆰 means
Only an assigned variation pair can change its glyph. A glyph is the drawn shape of a character. In a defined pair, the selector follows a base character and asks software to draw that base in a particular variant; the character’s meaning stays the same. If the pair is undefined or unsupported, the selector is normally invisible and the base looks unchanged.
The supplementary range was proposed in 1997 as “Plane 14 Variant Tag,” a plain-text way to carry glyph choices when font or style formatting could not travel with the text. It entered Unicode 4.0 in 2003.
Variation selectors serve different scripts: Mongolian has selectors for Mongolian letter forms, while supplementary selectors also appear in registered ideographic pairs for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. As of 2026, no pair using VS193 appears in the Unicode Ideographic Variation Database (IVD), the standardized-variant list, or the emoji-variation list.
It is a machine-facing request to draw a character variant, not a symbol with its own message.
Do not use VS193 as an emoji switch; a defined emoji sequence specifies its own selector.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions 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 󠆰
󠆰\E01B0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.