In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and
Industry
established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still
serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the
JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the
added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant
or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These
are what came to be known as the ghost characters
(幽霊文字).
The article is actually written informatively, but for anyone else who may have assumed from the title that this is some failing of Unicode–it is not, the goal of Unicode is to encode all human writing. This includes “nonsense” glyphs that have been widely used or interchanged between computer systems, including the (in)famous “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW” (⍼).
The article is actually written informatively, but for anyone else who may have assumed from the title that this is some failing of Unicode–it is not, the goal of Unicode is to encode all human writing. This includes “nonsense” glyphs that have been widely used or interchanged between computer systems, including the (in)famous “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW” (⍼).
It means azimuth https://ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/angzarr.html
*we have a typographical source that claims it means azimuth, but no known usages of it
I think Wikipedia’s summary of “unconfirmed branding” is a fair description.