⍼ - Why Nobody Knows What This One Unicode Character Means

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

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 🤯

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

Probably my favorite Unicode Bloc is the Phaistos Disc characters; hieroglyphic-type characters from an undeciphered language that has only been found on one single ancient greek artifact: The Phaistos Disc. it contains such gems as BEEHIVE (𐇧), CHILD (𐇔), GRATER (𐇹), and WAVY BAND (𐇼). Unicode takes their "encode every character ever" mission very seriously.

If I were to hazard a guess before I watched the video, I would have guessed it was used in a UI of some kind, since it's a right angle and those were sometimes used to create boxes on screen in older computers, but hearing it was in a set of mathematical symbols rules that out.