Enclosed Alphanumerics

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,^[3] which contains the set of Regional Indicator Symbols as of Unicode 6.0.

Purpose

Many of these characters were originally intended for use as bullets for lists.^[4] The parenthesized forms are historically based on typewriter approximations of the circled versions.^[4] 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."^[4] 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.^[4]

Unicode chart

Additional enclosed alphanumerics

Negative circled 1 through 10 are in the Dingbat Unicode block.

References

1. ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 22 March 2013. 
2. ↑ The Unicode Standard Version 1.0, Volume 1. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1990, 1991. ISBN 0-201-56788-1.  Check date values in: |date= (help)
3. ↑ Unicode chart U+1F100 (pdf)
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 The Unicode Standard, 6.0.1