Variation Selectors (Unicode block)
Unicode character block
Variation Selectors is a Unicode block containing 16 variation selectors used to specify a glyph variant for a preceding character. They are currently used to specify standardized variation sequences for mathematical symbols, emoji symbols, 'Phags-pa letters, and CJK unified ideographs corresponding to CJK compatibility ideographs.
These combining characters are variation selector-1 (for U+FE00) through variation selector-16 (U+FE0F), and are abbreviated VS1, VS16. Each applies to the immediately preceding character.
At present only standardized variation sequences with VS1-VS4, VS7, VS15 and VS16 have been defined; VS15 and VS16 are reserved to request that a character should be displayed as text or as an emoji respectively.
As of Unicode 17.0:
- CJK compatibility ideograph variation sequences contain VS1-VS3 (U+FE00-U+FE02)
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and B variation sequences contain VS1 (U+FE00) and VS2 (U+FE01)
- Emoji variation sequences contain VS16 (U+FE0F) for emoji-style (with color) or VS15 (U+FE0E) for text style (monochrome). This use is deprecated; newer emoji versions of existing dingbat characters have a separate code point for the emoji form, such as U+1FAAF 🪯 KHANDA whose dingbat form is U+262C ☬ ADI SHAKTI.
- Basic Latin, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms, Manichaean, Myanmar, Myanmar Extended-A, Phags-pa, and mathematical variation sequences contain only VS1 (U+FE00)
- Egyptian Hieroglyphs variation sequences VS1-VS7 (U+FE00-FE06) are used to rotate specific signs
- VS8-VS14 (U+FE07-FE0D) are not used for any variation sequences
| Variation Selectors[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+FE0x | VS 1 |
VS 2 |
VS 3 |
VS 4 |
VS 5 |
VS 6 |
VS 7 |
VS 8 |
VS 9 |
VS 10 |
VS 11 |
VS 12 |
VS 13 |
VS 14 |
VS 15 |
VS 16 |
Notes
| ||||||||||||||||
This list is continued in the Variation Selectors Supplement.
01History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Variation Selectors block:
| Version | Final code points | Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.2 | U+FE00..FE0F | 16 | L2/97-260 | Hiura, Hideki; Kobayashi, Tatsuo (1997-12-01), Plane 14 Variant Tag | |
| L2/98-039 | Aliprand, Joan; Winkler, Arnold (1998-02-24), "2.D.4 Variant Tag Mechanism", Preliminary Minutes - UTC #74 & L2 #171, Mountain View, CA - December 5, 1997 | ||||
| L2/98-277 | Hiura, Hideki; Kobayashi, Tatsuo (1998-07-29), Plane 14 Variant tag | ||||
| L2/98-281R (pdf, html) | Aliprand, Joan (1998-07-31), "III.E.3 Variant Tagging (III.E.3)", Unconfirmed Minutes, UTC #77 & NCITS Subgroup L2 # 174 JOINT MEETING, Redmond, WA -- July 29-31, 1998 | ||||
| L2/00-187 | Moore, Lisa (2000-08-23), "Variation Selector", UTC minutes -- Boston, August 8-11, 2000 | ||||
| L2/01-268 | Freytag, Asmus (2001-06-27), Variant selector | ||||
| L2/01-309 | Jenkins, John (2001-08-08), Variation selectors and Han | ||||
| L2/01-324R | Davis, Mark (2001-08-17), Variation Selectors [document has incorrect L2 ID number] | ||||
| L2/01-295R | Moore, Lisa (2001-11-06), "88-M5", Minutes from the UTC/L2 meeting #88 | ||||
| L2/02-154 | N2403 | Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2002-04-22), "7.12", Draft minutes of WG 2 meeting 41, Hotel Phoenix, Singapore, 2001-10-15/19 | |||
| L2/17-086 | Burge, Jeremy; et al. (2017-03-27), Add ZWJ, VS-16, Keycaps & Tags to Emoji_Component | ||||
| L2/17-103 | Moore, Lisa (2017-05-18), "E.1.7 Add ZWJ, VS-16, Keycaps & Tags to Emoji_Component", UTC #151 Minutes | ||||
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Variation Selectors (Unicode block)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.