General Punctuation

Block

Several characters in this block are usually not rendered with a directly visible glyph. Ten whitespace characters—U+2002 through U+200B (fixed en or 1⁄2 em, em, 1⁄3 em, 1⁄4 em, 1⁄6 em, figure and punctuation space, variable thin or 1⁄5 em and hair space, fixed zero-width space)—and U+205F (math medium or 2⁄9 em space) differ by horizontal width, while U+2000 and U+2001 (en and em quad) are effectively aliases of U+2002 and U+2003, respectively; another two, U+202F and U+2060 (ill-termed word joiner), are variants of U+2009 or U+2004 and U+200B that prohibit line breaks. Three zero-width characters, U+200B through U+200D (space, non-joiner and joiner), differ in how they affect ligation and shaping of adjacent letters such as contextual forms in Arabic. Eleven invisible characters—U+200E, U+200F (left-to-right and right-to-left mark), U+202A through U+202E (embeds, pops and overrides) and U+2066 through U+2069 (isolates)—control the directionality of text unless higher-level markup overrides them. There are explicit line and paragraph separators at U+2028 and U+2029.

Variation selectors

This block has variation sequences defined for East Asian punctuation positional variants of the curly quotation marks ‘...’ and “...”. (VS01) and (VS02) are used for East Asian punctuation positional variants. (VS03) is used for Sibe positional variants.

The non-fullwidth forms are expected to be separated with a space on one side, the fullwidth forms are not:

In vertical text, the fullwidth forms should display somewhat differently, and even as regular CJK quotation marks 「...」 and 『...』 if the vertical orientation property is set to "Hans":

Emoji

The General Punctuation block contains two emoji: U+203C and U+2049.

The block has four standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for the two emoji, both of which default to a text presentation.

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the General Punctuation block:

References

References

1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard.
2. "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard.
3. Lunde, Ken. (2023-10-14). "L2/23-212R: Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for four quotation marks".
4. CheonHyeong, Sim. (2025-01-08). "L2/25-028: Proposal to Add VS3 for Sibe Quotation Marks".
5. (2023-09-05). "UTR #51: Unicode Emoji". Unicode Consortium.
6. (2023-02-01). "UCD: Emoji Data for UTR #51". Unicode Consortium.
7. "UTS #51 Emoji Variation Sequences". The Unicode Consortium.
8. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names
9. See also [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10458-emoji-var.pdf L2/10-458], [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11414-emoji-var-seq.pdf L2/11-414], [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11415-unified-emoji-ref.pdf L2/11-415], and [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11429-emoji-var-seq-list.pdf L2/11-429]
10. Refer to the [[Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs#History. history section]] of the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block for additional emoji-related documents
11. Refer to the [[Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B#History. history section]] of the Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B block for additional math-related documents