⍼ - 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

I always thought it was a testing character, used to determine if the computer ran Unicode, because it was impossible to confuse it with any other known character at the time

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.

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?

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"

The thing about The Unicode Consortium is that they do not care what do the symbols mean. That's why they name characters like Upper Right Block Diagonal Lower Middle To Lower Right and not simply Lower Left Part Of A Larger Shape. They describe the look of a character and not its use. And if symbol exists and someone had used it, they add it in.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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

Fun fact: this isn't even the only meaningless character in Unicode. Japanese has infamous "ghost characters" (幽霊文字 yuurei moji) that exist purely because Japan's standards bodies made a bunch of typos when standardizing Shift-JIS. That got wrapped up into Unicode because Unicode has a standing policy of accepting pretty much anything that existed in an already standardized character set (which is also part of the reason why we have emoji).

The Angzar is truly one of the Unicode characters of all time!

Looks like a schematic symbol for a lightning rod to me. Current traveling towards ground. I think that lends creedence to the other gentlemen's post saying that it is a symbol for electrical load on a circuit, of which a lighting rod is a specific case.

2:46 It's actually added for Teletext compatibility, not Apple II compatibility. Teletext was a way for analog broadcasters to broadcast text.

I would guess that ⍼ represents "exiting or breaking a known system" - something used to describe that an element cannot be used or transcends the understanding of a system that it's attempting to operate in. It could be in maths, physics, programming, philosophy, etc.

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.

Thanks for making this good video, it was so ⍼!

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.

It can be a symbol for large models, like LLM. Large models come from large data sets that are then converted into much smaller files, but can then be used to generate content. The downward zigzag arrow symbolized this, because the data is being reduced in size, but is not being compressed like WinZip.

It's also the Linking Sigil, "LS" from Chaos Magick

Hi, I'm the girl who painted that Linking Sigil shown at 4:20 (nice) in the video. Never thought it would get as much exposure as it did, but woah I am definitely impressed!

Back in the 80's SPSS used this symbol to mean "unplottable negative value", like, for a scatterplot to see the correlation between time to complete the survey and number of correct answers, it's okay if the scatterplot shows a negative *correlation* of data points from the upper left to the lower right inside the plot, but this data representation assumes 1) no one reversed time and completed their survey in -2 minutes, or 2) got 14 questions wrong on a 10-question form. So this was (and may still be) statistical shorthand for "data points appearing in supposedly impossible negative territory."

Just noticed that some modern routers use the downward arrow symbol for download speed indication. So maybe this symbol is supposed to be used to represent abnormal variation in download speeds

So, back in the day, we used to have terminals that printed characters out -- like a typewriter -- instead of a computer screen. -- You would connect to a mainframe, send it commands, and it would respond by printing characters out. A common trick, was to use backspace (which can't delete an already printed character), and just print a new letter over the top. So to underline something, you could print a "_" and a backspace, and then the letter "S", and that would give you an underlined S right there. This looks like two characters that may have been used in some ancient application, that they were probably porting to a modern system (that used screens instead of printers!) back in the mid 90s, and they wanted to make sure that future terminal applications would maintain compatibility with some crazy double printed character.

I've found a few references to Dutch economics textbooks using it to denote the Y-axis continuing below the X-axis.

I AM THE WITCH KING OF ANGZARR! *helmet crumples in on itself*

You should do a video on how printers still use the ⎊ as the stop button, when that symbol has largely been phased out from older European stop signs.

The beginnings of Unicode were apparently somewhat chaotic. The math symbols in particular contain a lot of ideas that some working group members had collected from unknown sources and just threw in. There was seemingly endless space so probably the thinking was "why not add anything that might be useful". This was, of course, foolish in hind sight.

Well, I used the symbol in a research essay at school to mark connections to different chapters, so I guess it has a meaning for me now.

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.

It's for when the market gone mad and the price goes back in time

After seeing this I used the character as a GroupMe topic name and it broke the ability to change topics for almost a full year

It's likely a meteorological map symbol that is so obscure it has been lost from disuse. e.g. it might mean lightning associated with volcanic ash. The ordinary symbol for lightning is very similar with a right angle and a zigzag with an arrowhead. The double zigzag with a right angle in a different orientation means heavy thunderstorm associated with a sandstorm. It is so similar it is almost surely a weather symbol that has been copied wrong, or is no longer in use.

He actually put the phonetic guide for Sigil on the screen and still mispronounced it 😂

If you keep the good work, I think your channel is gonna ⍼!

The chaos magic sigil you mentioned is older than 2004 - it was used on the Occult Forums message board before that.

Me: hey mom can we get ⍼ Mom: we have ⍼ at home ⍼ at home: ϟ∟

Trying to read that character on my Smartwatch was a struggle lol

My uncle was an electrical engineer. He knew the dollar was doomed and came up with that symbol to display it. He called it the Dwindle, because that's what the dollar was doing. He actually got a money order for $5, and sent it in, so it would be recognized in the future. He's been gone for 6 years now, but I know he would be happy to know his symbol will soon be recognized worldwide.

Vertical line is Y axis. Horisontal line is X axis. Arrow actually starts from where horisontal and vertical lines meet, and it is the Z axis. The squigly line starts from where the three axis meet, and it goes 3 dimantionally up and right towards the viewer.

I almost forgot about this symbol! I actually registered it for a few bucks way back then. The reason was that I wanted a half-satirical half-informative content creator on a then non-existent medium to wonder about its meaning in about five minutes.

I wonder if it is meant to represent a lightning rod? Considering, that there is a symbol indicating a short to ground

If I had to intuit its meaning I would assume it means irrational function, and its variants specifically refer to the kind of irrational function as it appears on a graph such as sinusoidal or rising edges etc.

Might be for a graph which is not bijective (so, it crosses any vertical line more than once); or maybe an electrically active ground plane antenna (a wire perpendicular to horizontal plane).

"This weird little guy has been programming into nearly every single computer on Earth for decades, having been updated and carried over countless different times. But if no one seems to know what it means, then that raises a kind of strange question: Why is this symbol in your computer and who put it there?" I imagine there's quite a lot of code that's just sitting in most operating systems where the original purpose and author have been long forgotten, but no one removes it because they're afraid it'll break something. Backwards compatibility and all that...

Barbara Beeton responded to this video herself: "The information in the video is inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the inclusion of the character in the STIX collection was based on its presence in a version of ISO 9573-13 earlier than the 1991 version cited, a version which existed long before AFII was formed."

I've used that symbol decades ago meaning that the vertical axis in a graph is NOT continuous nor proportional. Example: a graph of X:workers in a Y:monthly-salary. In this graph, there will be nothing between $0 and, let's say, $1,000, so instead of drawing a huge empty bottom, you hack the start to 1,000 instead of 0; plus you hack the Y-axis again between $5,000 and $20,000 because that's the top of the "normal workers" and the minimum of the "CEOs and friends", thus the Y-axis is NOT a complete-range nor continuous and the top range of paid people is distorted to look closer to the workers.

In the Japanese encoding system JIS X 0208, there are a few kanji encoded that are not found in any kanji dictionary. These are commonly known as “ghost characters” (yuurei moji 幽霊文字). The standard acknowledged the sources for these characters, but later people were unable to find these characters in the original sources. Later it was found that the encoded forms were wrong, and the forms that were supposed to be taken, were not encoded. Despite this, one character remains truly elusive, 55-27 彁 (U+5F41), its sources were not acknowledged and no results were found after extensive research. The character 彁 has since then become an internet phenomenon.

It looks like the Y-Axis is being reduced, i.e. “reduction” or “reduce”. Or even indicate the y-axis is showing a negative value.

I could see it as a way to represent a third axis (Z axis) since having a third line identical to X and Y would just look like a weird sideways y or something - in other words, it would be easily confused. And since trying to add extra detail like dashes or entire included symbols would make the symbol unnecessarily complex, having an arrow to signify “the third axis” was the most simplistic possible solution. Basically just Axis X and Y as the angle, arrow designating axis Z. Though I’ve got no clue what it is for sure so don’t quote me here.

Short circuit, a logical contradiction, chaos, they all apply. It is the symbol for Novueval Times, the era of widespread societal collapse in which we live.

Search up the Poynting vector in electrical engineering and also apply that to a short circuit so it represents the short circuit towards the flow of electrons across a conductive material. IE: a electric welder follows that idea.

What? With an "arrow" at the bottom it means a contradiction in . I've used it on University of Warsaw on my logic classes. You can also find it on some old electrical devices from East Germany (like from 50', max 60') and electrical engines from eastern block. Par ex. heavy duty, important elevator engines, munition cranes etc. It was in yellow, or red, with, or without an arrow at the bottom. And it means that this engine is grounded in separate way for high power electric current, like a lighting, or high power surge from some explosive/energy blast. Since more modern (to the old ones i was writing before) had build in grounding conduit, in this role symbol went absolute. My grandfather was an electrician and worked on this things. I doubt that even one plate with this symbol survived. In readable condition.

Is ChatGPT correct here? The symbol "⍼" is known as the "APL functional symbol circle jot". It is used in the programming language APL (A Programming Language), which is known for its use of unique symbols to represent operations and functions. APL is a language that has been historically significant in the fields of mathematics and computer science, particularly for applications involving array processing and manipulation. In APL, each symbol or combination of symbols represents a specific function or operation, often related to array or matrix manipulation. The "circle jot" symbol specifically is used to denote a particular function or operation within the language, though its exact use can depend on the context within which it appears. APL is known for its concise and expressive syntax, which allows complex operations to be represented in a very compact form. However, this also means that APL can be challenging to read and understand for those not familiar with its symbols and syntax.

I'm such a Unicode nerd, I got super excited when you said "I need to explain how Unicode works in the first place," even though I already know damn well how it works. (And that message box at 1:55 brought back terrifying memories of '90s foreign websites in Netscape Navigator.) Still, I never heard the story of the angzarr before. Thanks for helping add another layer to my nerdiness!

Actually this came up in a course when I was studying IT at uni and our lecturer mentioned that he had some old documentation that showed the character was used to represent

at face value i feel like it's telling me everything i did was wrong and I should feel bad.

the symbols for drawing things... petscii had all the extended ascii characters for drawing pseudo windows, with either double or single lines, they're probably in unicode now.

I think this symbol should come to represent "Dord" which is the accidental word invented as a symbol for density that was added to the dictionary when someone mistook "D or d" for a word because because someone didn't leave enough space between the "or" and the lower and uppercase D's. Spaces are important. I once saw a hand written sign that was meant to say "Pen is broken" but because there was no space between "pen" and "is" It led me to ask the only male there how he had done it, and why he felt we all needed to know it was broken. He was very confused until I pointed out the sign to him.

this character clearly means "L+get shocked"

My first thought of the character was that it looked like going back a page, with the right angle being the corner of the page, and the arrow indicating to turn back.

It looks very similar to the symbols used in electrical engineering and probably other engineering.. It looks like a symbol that means The angle is less than is shown (like the zig-zag used to show a break in values on an axis) The idea of it being something that may need to be represented due to what is available to be shown accurately.

ChatGPT says this: The "INSERTION SYMBOL" (⍼), represented by the Unicode codepoint U+237C, is primarily used in APL (A Programming Language) and related contexts. In APL, it typically denotes insertion or the placement of elements into an array or a data structure. It serves as a visual indicator in APL code to signify operations involving insertion.

To me, this has got "leave that slot open, we'll put something there later" written all over it.

To me it looks like it's not just a right angle, but it is a sign of 3D space coordinates and the arrow running right through the Y axis makes it a bit confusing. I would guess it means "spatial vector" as you have a sign of a XYZ coordinate system and a crooked arrow running through it, that looks like a sum of spatial vectors.

1:55 I get those running old games from other countries. Now I know a reason that might be happening thanks

Angzar looks almost like something you'd see in a schematic. Except not.

Wikipedia page for _Ellis (sigil):_ [clarifies that “sigil” is pronounced /ˈsɪdʒəl/] Sam: [confidently mispronounces it as /ˈsɪɡəl/ multiple times]

"listen kid, I don't have much time, the secret for immortality is ⍼" *melts*

This is symbol used to indicate underground electrical cable, in USSR, used with numbers to pinpoint exact location. You should not dig in about 5m radius around it.

The most amusing part of this to me is the people in the comments stating with 100% certainty what it means. They're absolutely sure that they know, despite the fact that several different meanings are being stated this way. You can't really provide any proof in a RU-vid comment, can you?

Tired: Sneaking a chaos magick sigil into the Unicode database Fired: Using a Unicode character with a completely unkown purpose as a base for your chaos magick sigil

That ended up being much more interesting than i thought it would be. That was like 7/9 as interesting.

Arrow downward means electricity and L means Inductance which is the tendency of an electrical conductor to oppose a change in the electric current flowing through it. So it's a device that is electricaly controled modulation of the inductance

Given the sheer number and variety of characters represented in Unicode, it would be extraordinary if there weren’t any errors.

I found this video going down the rabbit hole of why incandescence was federally banned from being manufactured in the US

⍼.

it's clearly a "lemon power" symbol. one of the most important symbols in all history of writing.

I'm watching this video from a Fedora machine and what vexes me the most is that it's displaying this bizarre looking no meaning thingy correctly when it cant display the ratio character and shows a box with its Unicode

Imagine losing a channel just because youtube stops showing it to you randomly. Last year was quite a period of life, and there was a lot of mess. And amidst all that youtube just stopped recommending this and I didn't mind at first, then forgot. This is so funny. The kind of funny because of how ridiculous the situation is. Lol!

The symbol ⍼ was actually first invented somewhere between 1973 and 1978 when it appeared in an architectural drawing. It was more than likely just a printing error. Then in the early 1980s, around 1983 it began to be used in certain business documents, generally for memos and some presentations.

Obscure. "Off the map". It roughly translates to "no logical connection to the source data or graph". Such as data outside the first quadrant, or an illogical conclusion, a wrong extrapolation, an answer in a different system (eg a Complex answer to a Real relation), or leaping out of (shorting) the circuit. Or, "we must leave the known behind." I can't find a citation for it. I saw it informally used in the 1980's in a course on Predicate Logic, on a chalkboard.

I really ⍼ the video. Thanks!

3:36 That’s me, thanks for the warning. To anyone who cares to know the actual reason, please prove you watched the whole video and I’ll let you know for $5.

Pass the banana down already, whats the wait, the instructions were clear!

I feel sad for this Unicode character "⍼". This one must be remember.

"Doing hard things is hard, excpet when it isn't" -Sam 2022

In the ISO/IEC TR 9573-13:1991 document it just stated "Entity Name: angzarr" and "Short description: angle with down zig-zag arrow ". It seems the symbol doesn't have any specific meaning by default.

This video kind of explains why moving a text file from a PC to a Mac in the very early 90's often resulted in gibberish.