Enclosed Alphanumerics

"Ⓓ" redirects here. For the U.S. political party with that logo, see Democratic Party (United States).
"" redirects here. For other uses, see E and E (disambiguation).
Enclosed Alphanumerics
Range U+2460..U+24FF
(160 code points)
Plane BMP
Scripts Common
Assigned 160 code points
Unused 0 reserved code points
Unicode version history
1.0.0 139 (+139)
3.2 159 (+20)
4.0 160 (+1)
Note: [1][2]

Enclosed alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop. There is another block for these characters (U+1F100U+1F1FF), encoded in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which contains the set of Regional Indicator Symbols as of Unicode 6.0.

Purpose

Many of these characters were originally intended for use as bullets for lists.[3] The parenthesized forms are historically based on typewriter approximations of the circled versions.[3] Although these roles have been supplanted by styles and other markup in "rich text" contexts, the characters are included in the Unicode standard "for interoperability with the legacy East Asian character sets and for the occasional text context where such symbols otherwise occur."[3] The Unicode Standard considers these characters to be distinct from characters which are similar in form but specialized in purpose, such as the circled C, P or R characters which are defined as copyright and trademark symbols or the circled a used for an at sign.[3]

Unicode chart

Enclosed Alphanumerics[1]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+246x
U+247x
U+248x
U+249x
U+24Ax
U+24Bx
U+24Cx
U+24Dx
U+24Ex
U+24Fx
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 8.0

Emoji

The Enclosed Alphanumerics block contains one emoji: U+24C2.[4][5]

It defaults to a text presentation and has two standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15).[6][7]

Emoji variation sequences
U+ 24C2
base codepoint
base+VS15 (text)
base+VS16 (emoji)

Additional enclosed alphanumerics

The uses of "black" and "white" below assume that the characters are part of black text on a white background.

The Mathematical Operators section of Unicode includes enclosed versions of some common symbols and punctuation marks.

References

  1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 22 March 2013.
  2. The Unicode Standard Version 1.0, Volume 1. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1990–1991. ISBN 0-201-56788-1.
  3. 1 2 3 4 The Unicode Standard, 6.0.1
  4. "UTR #51: Unicode Emoji". Unicode Consortium. 2015-11-12.
  5. "UCD: Emoji Data for UTR #51". Unicode Consortium. 2015-11-11.
  6. "Unicode Character Database: Standardized Variants". The Unicode Consortium.
  7. "Unicode Character Database: Standardized Variation Sequences". The Unicode Consortium.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, April 01, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.