⍼ - Why Nobody Knows What This One Unicode Character Means

Video written by Adam Chase

[mrlegodudealt]

I like to imagine it was a scribble in a margin of some obscure math proof that people were too afraid to question and it just kept getting passed around

[jamesross]

It is a little known electrical engineering schematic symbol. It simply means a ground to neutral leg junction of a 3 phase circuit. The point where they come together. Where you might find this symbol is just before an earth ground symbol. It is discontinued now for the most part, but was used to denote a way to help with the radio noise a 3-phase circuit makes so as to not allow bleed over to shortwave radio, cb radio, uhf tv, ect. Now the noise is generally cancelled out with ferrite beads, shielding, and filters.

[lampboy]

Similarly, there is "彁"
This is a Japanese Kanji (Aka. Chinese character) but contains absolutly no meaning known. This is called "Yūrē Moji" or "Ghost Character" in Japan, which was quite more, but most of their origins were found eventually. In the end only this one letter "彁" left as mistery.

[SkyQuakee]

wow this video was really ⍼ i especially liked the part where hai explains why ⍼ is still a unicode character ⍼ video ⍼ /10

[J.DeLaPoer]

Its the symbol for electrical load on a circuit. I haven’t seen it in like 30 years, but there you go. I wasn’t aware it was a proprietary thing, but it may be a Swiss/German standard not used elsewhere.

[anzahanifathallah]

according to XKCD #2606, the character is a symbol for Larry Potter, so that's what i'm going with. the same comic also helpfully pointed out that ⩼ means "confused alligator", ⭈ means "snakes over there", and ⨓ means "integral that avoids a bee on the whiteboard"

[rrobz]

This video needs an update. If it hasn't been posted yet (there are a crapton of comments and could only scan so much), the source of this character that apparently led to its incorporation into ISO/IEC TR 9573-13 is a 21 page insert appended to a typeface catalogue from Monotype Corp. Ltd., entitled "List of mathematical characters" (1972), where the symbol was designated with the matrix serial number S16139. The whole AFII thing was a red herring.

[bobburns]

As "Manager of Text and Imaging Systems" at Amiga, I was amused to see something I did 40 years ago. I wondered if your example at 1:38 showed glyphs for the same hex character, but those shown for IBM/Mac/Amiga would have been encoded 9A/8B/E7. I offer: displaying E5 on all three would yield σ/Â/å. Unicode was a great but we weren't ready for all the places 16-bit characters broke things, especially as there was only 256 KB of RAM 🤯

[howtodrawwithpaint]

Unicode Character “⍼” (U+237C)
Name: Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
Unicode Version: 3.2 (March 2002)
Block: Miscellaneous Technical, U+2300 - U+23FF
Plane: Basic Multilingual Plane, U+0000 - U+FFFF
Script: Code for undetermined script (Zyyy)
Category: Math Symbol (Sm)
Bidirectional Class: Other Neutral (ON)
Combining Class: Not Reordered (0)
Character is Mirrored: No
HTML Entity: ⍼ ⍼ ⍼
UTF-8 Encoding: 0xE2 0x8D 0xBC
UTF-16 Encoding: 0x237C
UTF-32 Encoding: 0x0000237C

[warrenporter]

In meteorology, we have symbols for denoting surface weather observations. ☇ means lightning and ☈ means thunderstorm. Maybe ⍼ was a corruption of one the thunderstorm one?

[andimcc]

Decent video, there's one thing about Unicode I think is important to understand to understand why this wasn't just allowed to happen, but *had* to happen. The goal of Unicode was to replace *every* previously existing character encoding standard. That means a core rule of Unicode is that it must support "round-trip conversion" with every older standard. You must be able to convert a document in a previous standard into unicode, and then back again to the previous standard, and the final document must be unchanged. So for example "one dot leader" (․) might be in practice exactly the same as a period (.), but Unicode has to give them separate characters, because in XCCS (the Xerox Character Code Standard from 1980) they were separate characters, so if Unicode collapsed them both into period then converting an XCCS document containing one dot leaders to unicode and back would result in the one dot leaders being changed to periods. And if there was a risk that converting an XCCS document to Unicode might damage (alter) the document, then that might give people an incentive to keep around documents in XCCS, thus defeating the goal of Unicode to be the one and only world standard. This roundtrip rule is why, if an ISO standard ever contained a character simply by accident (like ⍼), Unicode is *not allowed* to correct that accident.

The roundtrip conversion requirement is also part of why Unicode contains about twenty different characters for a space (at least one of which is completely redundant with another space character) and, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, a prayer ("﷽" -- that is one character right there, codepoint 65021, it's called the Basmala and it's a blessing common in the Muslim world to open prayers or in some places legal documents).

[mwhearn]

Angzarr is now the name of my Big Bad Evil Guy in the DND campaign I'm running. And he comes with his own symbol too. Thanks Half As Interesting.

[Soupie]

I am reminded of the stories about Van Halen's contract, which specifies no browm M&Ms. A quick look lets them determine if all fine print of the contract has been read.
This could be a Unicode version of that check.

[sundhaug]

This is actually not the only character in Unicode with no known meaning. Because Unicode intends to have an encoding for any script ever used, it also includes stuff like the Linear A script used by the Minoans 1900 BC. Linear A has yet to be translated.

[HenryBloggit]

Half as Interesting single-handedly keeping the stock footage industry alive.

[MrRosco]

The symbol ⍼ is known as the "Z notation input delimiter." It's used in formal methods like the Z notation for specifying and designing computer systems to mark the beginning and end of input.

[carlgomberg]

At 0:40 there's a version with a rounded "lightning bolt" that looks like a sine wave going up the y-axis. Taken that way, this symbol could represent a rotated "right hand rule" showing the moving charge (sine/triangle AC waveform on y-axis), the magnetic field line (straight x-axis), and the magnetic force (vector/arrow on z-axis).

[Alex_Deam]

2:36 My fave Unicode fact is that the Unicode Consortium is all those tech companies plus, randomly, Oman's Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs

[nicolethe_slay]

This character “‽” is called Interrobang, the code (unicode) is U+203D and the html is ‽

[felixq]

This symbol is a cultural staple of LSD users, and especially in the LSD user/Chaos Magick practitioner overlap. To some, while under the influence, it's a perfect visual representation of time and space, and can appear 3D with the S wrapping around the L. Some Chaos Magicians also use it as a symbol for a "magickal current, " which I don't know how to explain without a foundational lesson on the whole system. The LS current or Ellis current are search terms that could lead you to more. If you see graffiti of this symbol, there's a high chance it was put there by someone trying to utilize the LS current.

This is a very popular system of magic for a wide variety of anti-establishment subcultures, and this current in particular is supposed to have to do with bringing down the status quo and/or channeling chaos. In that way, it sort of links into Discordianism, but with much less joviality and much less regard for anyone's safety, including the practitioners.

Very many of the practitioners I have met work in the tech industry, some of which have been over the age of 60 and got into it by way of Thelema, or the works of Austin Osman Spare.

Fun fact: Jack Parsons, a prolific chemist and rocket engineer, practiced Thelema and credits that for his breakthroughs on rocket engine technologies.

Disclaimer: I *strongly* advise against anyone practicing chaos magick. I have only ever seen it lead to significant and worsening mental health issues, including severe, persistent delusions, scapegoating, and dangerous levels of escapism. "If it's not working, it's because you don't believe hard enough and you need to strengthen your delusion, " is a literal foundation of this belief system. I'm interested in magic systems from an anthropological perspective, and can say with confidence that getting deeply involved with this one messes you up bad. Please don't.