Enclosed Alphanumerics

Enclosed Alphanumerics
Range	U+2460..U+24FF (160 code points)
Plane	BMP
Scripts	Common
Assigned	160 code points
Unused	0 reserved code points
Unicode version history
1.0.0	139 (+139)
3.2	159 (+20)
4.0	160 (+1)
Note:

Enclosed alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop. There is another block for these characters (U+1F100—U+1F1FF), encoded in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which contains the set of Regional Indicator Symbols as of Unicode 6.0.

Many of these characters were originally intended for use as bullets for lists. The parenthesized forms are historically based on typewriter approximations of the circled versions. Although these roles have been supplanted by styles and other markup in "rich text" contexts, the characters are included in the Unicode standard "for interoperability with the legacy East Asian character sets and for the occasional text context where such symbols otherwise occur." The Unicode Standard considers these characters to be distinct from characters which are similar in form but specialized in purpose, such as the circled C, P or R characters which are defined as copyright and trademark symbols or the circled a used for an at sign.

The Enclosed Alphanumerics block contains one emoji: U+24C2, the enclosed M used as a symbol for mask works.

It defaults to a text presentation and has two standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15).

The uses of "black" and "white" below assume that the characters are part of black text on a white background.

The Mathematical Operators section of Unicode includes enclosed versions of some common symbols and punctuation marks.

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