CJK Compatibility

Not to be confused with CJK Compatibility Forms or CJK Compatibility Ideographs.
For a list of all CJK characters encoded in Unicode, see CJK Unified Ideographs.
CJK Compatibility
RangeU+3300..U+33FF
(256 code points)
PlaneBMP
ScriptsKatakana (88 char.)
Common (168 char.)
Assigned256 code points
Unused0 reserved code points
Unicode version history
1.0.0 (1991)187 (+187)
1.1 (1993)249 (+62)
4.0 (2003)256 (+7)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [1][2]

CJK Compatibility is a Unicode block containing square symbols (both CJK and Latin alphanumeric) encoded for compatibility with East Asian character sets. In Unicode 1.0, it was divided into two blocks, named CJK Squared Words (U+3300–U+337F) and CJK Squared Abbreviations (U+3380–U+33FF).[3] The square forms can have different presentations when they are used in horizontal or vertical text. For example, the characters U+333E ㌾ SQUARE BORUTO (from ボルト) and U+3327 ㌧ SQUARE TON (from トン) should look different in horizontal and in vertical right-to-left:[4] ㌧㌾

Characters U+337B through U+337E are the Japanese era calendar scheme symbols Heisei (㍻), Shōwa (㍼), Taishō (㍽) and Meiji (㍾) (also available in certain legacy sets, such as the "NEC special characters" extension for JIS X 0208, as included in Microsoft's version and later JIS X 0213).[5] The Reiwa era symbol (U+32FF ㋿ SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA) is in Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (the CJK Compatibility block having been fully allocated by the time of its commencement).

  1. ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  3. ^ "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium.
  4. ^ Lunde, Ken; Ishi, Koji (2023-07-17). "UAX #50: Unicode Vertical Text Layout". www.unicode.org. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
  5. ^ Lunde, Ken (2019-03-21). "A Brief History of Japan's Era Name Ligatures". CJK Type Blog. Adobe Inc.