I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
The 64 coincidence between I Ching and DNA codons is always fascinating.
Probably coincidence, but it’s one of those patterns that makes you pause for a moment.
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
Yes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself.
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
That’s unavoidable given the goal:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.
What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
The stated goal of Unicode is to support every past and present writing system in world world. Say what you will about that but I think just because a symbol's meaning might be obscure to us doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.
Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
Great find — Satisfying to know ⍼'s origin story.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
[1] https://leibniz-bouvet.swarthmore.edu/letters/letter-j-18-ma... [2] https://leibniz-translations.com/binary [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78369.The_I_Ching_and_th...
The 64 coincidence between I Ching and DNA codons is always fascinating. Probably coincidence, but it’s one of those patterns that makes you pause for a moment.
Something got doubled six times in a row, big deal.
In the case of the i-ching it's literally six bits of binary (expressed in yarrow stalks).
In genetic codons there's four symbols instead of two, and three places instead of six, so the effect is the same. (Does base 4 have a name?)
>(Does base 4 have a name?)
Quaternary
I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
That's become of the most memorable threads on Hacker News to me. I definitely think about it at least once most weeks.
Closure finally!
what will i do... with all this extra time....
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
Elevation -- the angle above the horizon -- is usually what's paired with azimuth.
Yes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself.
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.7...
Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
> how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
IMO the biggest omission in Unicode are game controller button and keyboard emojis, as very frequently arise in game tutorials.
Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
“RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C
The existence of characters that need this much work to explain suggests to be that unicode is bloated. Not the only thing that suggests that, either.
That’s unavoidable given the goal: Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
https://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
The stated goal of Unicode is to support every past and present writing system in world world. Say what you will about that but I think just because a symbol's meaning might be obscure to us doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.
> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian
Ah, of course :)
Honestly the little example of how a sextant works was more interesting to me.
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
Let's hope fonts will start correcting it to the original form
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
Now can we find an example where this symbol was actually used in practice?
I didn't know that this is a mystery?
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
The typographic symbol was the element in question, not what "Azimuth" is.
Okay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?
Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
Maybe read the article next time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.
Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!
Check the photos in the article, specifically this one [1]
"Haussystem Didot", the title of the catalog, refers to a letter setting by the printing agency Didot, which is the one I linked on wikipedia.
[1] https://ionathan.ch/assets/images/angzarr/Berthold%201900.jp...