Post #1952647
2026-02-11 00:28 UTC
@piggo @simontatham It’s intended to denote kilowatts. It was part of CJK (a pre-Unicode character set used in Japan), which was then folded into the Unicode standard in the interests of backward compatibility.
I have a vague memory that when I worked for WATCOM in the early 90s, one of my jobs involved ensuring compatibility with DOS running in Japanese with the CJK character set. (Hmm, I guess I’ve contributed to the “age verification” memes that are going around.)
Replies (2)
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@csk@mathstodon.xyz 2026-02-11 00:29
@piggo @simontatham Sorry, not just Japan. CJK stands for “Chinese, Japanese, Korean”, naturally.
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@simontatham@hachyderm.io 2026-02-11 07:49
@csk @piggo I'm curious about that character set. I've heard of "CJK" as a _general_ term for East Asian character encodings, but I thought the pre-Unicode ones were all country-specific. Certainly all the ones I've run into while working on PuTTY were. As far as I knew, only Unicode had ever been audacious enough to try to squash all the CJK writing systems into a single character encoding.