Ideographic Description Characters
Info · Characters
The Ideographic Description Characters Unicode block contains symbols used to visually describe the composition of Han characters (used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). These symbols help linguists, educators, and font designers explain the internal structure of complex ideographs.
Ideographic Description Characters is a Unicode block containing graphic characters used for describing CJK ideographs. They are used in Ideographic Description Sequences (IDS) to provide a description of an ideograph, in terms of what other ideographs make it up and how they are laid out relative to one another. An IDS provides the reader with a description of an ideograph that cannot be represented properly, usually because it is not encoded in Unicode; rendering systems are not intended to automatically compose the pieces into a complete ideograph, and the descriptions are not standardized. U+2FF0 to U+2FFB were introduced from GBK; U+2FFC to U+2FFF were devised later and introduced in Unicode 15.1 (2023).