Variation Selector-80

Append it to a supported Han character.

An Ideographic Variation Sequence is a Han character—one used in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean writing—followed by a variation selector. The full pair must be registered in the Ideographic Variation Database (IVD), which ties that pair to a particular glyph set. The selector number alone does not name a shape.

The mechanism addresses a practical East Asian typography problem: font choice could erase a needed regional or historical form in plain text. An early documented proposal dated 2003 records those conflicting traditions; Adobe-Japan1 entered the IVD on 2007-12-14 so Japanese font glyphs that older character codes could not specify could be named in text.

Why does VS80 disappear?

Unsupported pairings normally show the base character and hide VS80.

Variation selectors are default-ignorable. Under the CSS Fonts 4 rule, browser font matching seeks a font that supports the full base-plus-selector sequence before falling back to the base character.

In the IVD release dated 2026-08-03, the sequence file contains no U+E013F entry. That release therefore assigns no registered, universal glyph instruction to VS80 itself.

It is not a style switch.

VS80 cannot mean bold, italic, emoji, or a Japanese font on its own. Its effect belongs to the preceding ideograph and registered collection; the same selector number can participate in unrelated sequences on different ideographs.

Collections can target different glyph inventories, such as Japanese publishing or government name records. A selector’s meaning therefore changes with its base character and collection, not with a universal VS80 style code.