Variation Selector-256

Put it immediately after a supported base character.

Variation Selector-256 is not a symbol with its own picture or message. It is a combining mark that helps a text system choose a predefined glyph for the character before it. For this selector, the useful case is an ideographic variation sequence: the exact base-plus-selector pair, not the selector alone, carries the instruction.

Only defined variation sequences may change display. If the pair is unsupported or unregistered, the base normally keeps its usual appearance and the selector stays invisible. Copy it from the palette above only when you know the base character and the intended sequence.

Why is Variation Selector-256 invisible?

It has no standalone glyph; it modifies the preceding character.

Variation selectors have no graphic shape of their own. Fonts and text layout systems treat them as default-ignorable marks, so unsupported input is normally rendered as the base character with no visible selector. A “show hidden” mode may reveal a diagnostic box or marker; that display is a tool’s signal, not the mark’s normal appearance.

Do not read a blank result as proof that the character was deleted. The selector may still be present in the text even when the current font cannot show the requested variant.

Why was Variation Selector-256 created?

The documented Unicode trail starts with a 2000 proposal: three Mongolian selectors already existed, and a larger pool was being prepared for standardized variant selection. In 2002, ISO/IEC 10646 working-group minutes moved the supplementary range to E0100–E01EF and named it Variation Selectors Supplement. A 2003 proposal argued that the high-numbered selectors, including VS256, should serve ideographic variation collections.

The practical problem was plain text. A Han character can keep the same meaning while its required glyph differs across Chinese, Japanese, Korean, historical Vietnamese, scholarly, or administrative contexts. The IVD records base-plus-selector pairs so an agreed glyph subset can survive outside a font choice; the same selector number has no fixed meaning across bases. As of 2026-08-03, the IVD sequence file contains no registered sequence using VS256.