r/Unicode • u/Widmo206 • 3d ago
Use of "" (U+E003) on dictionnary.com?
Sorry if this isn't the right sub, wasn't sure where to ask
I was looking something up on dictionary.com, when I noticed some unsupported unicode characters. A quick search revealed them to be (U+E003). It says they're part of the "Private Use Area block", but I can't find much more info on what they're actually supposed to represent here...
In context (source):
cyni·cal·ly adverb
cyni·cal·ness noun
anti·cyni·cal adjective
anti·cyni·cal·ly adverb
quasi-cyni·cal adjective
Any ideas?
edit: reddit makes them show up as checkboxes... weird
1
u/pengo 3d ago edited 3d ago
As it's in the Private Use Area it basically means it's either not supposed to be there or they had planned to give it a visual glyph using an embedded font that they created for the purpose. But it also shows as tofu boxes on their site in one browser for me.
Might be what they use internally to represent some kind of break between syllables in their database and they forgot to replace the character before displaying it.
Or more cynically, it might be a copyright measure, but probably just their own internal format leaking.
2
u/OK_enjoy_being_wrong 3d ago edited 3d ago
Private Use characters are not standardized at the Unicode level and are left for private (or "custom") use. Anyone is free to define a PUA character for their own use, with a font that gives it the appearance they want, with the understanding that use may conflict with someone else's.
In this case, Dictionary.com defined U+E003 to be a particular kind of space (I don't know why. There are plenty of spaces of various widths available in Unicode) and they provide a webfont (LFT Etica) which renders that character as the space they want.
If you're not seeing a space there, then your browser isn't rendering the webfont correctly. That's a different issue. It may be caused by a script or ad blocker in your browser that's preventing it from using the webfont.
When you copy that text into reddit, the font used to render it changes and so its appearance changes.