Usage of Encircled Kanji


There appear to be some kanji and other characters such as ①, ②, ③, Ⓐ, ㊄, ㊗,
㊛, ㊑, and many more, which are enclosed in circles.

These characters are listed in unicode and there are quite a lot of them, with
various seemingly unrelated kanji, as well as numbers and hiragana and
katakana characters.

There is also a character called 'combining enclosing circle' which appears to
be intended to circle the character before it, though this doesn't work in all
fonts.

Finally, in Microsoft Word, when the Japanese IME is selected, it even offers
a menu option to encircle a character in your document with quite varied
settings as to how to display it.

It appears that there has been a lot of effort put into making these
characters accessible, and yet they don't have any clear usage that I can
find, or even a mention of them at all online. Why do these exist?




These are called 丸囲み文字.

  * 丸囲み数字 or 丸数字 (①②③...) are very common, and their purpose is to write a numbered list of items. The equivalent in English is `(1) (2) (3)` or `i. ii. iii.`. Characters ① to ⑳ have been defined long before the introduction of Unicode, and you will see them a lot in Japanese documents.
  * Other 丸囲み文字 are just symbols that means what the enclosed kanji means. ㊊ is "Monday", ㊑ is "corporation", [㊙ is "secret"](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/43644/5010), ㊞ is "stamp/seal", and so on. Although they seem random, they are there because they have been actually used in some fields.

These characters have been used at least partly because Japanese typography
preferred characters neatly aligned in a grid. These symbols share the same
fixed width as kanji and hiragana, and it's easy to align them using the
poorest word processors. We even have fixed-width versions of Roman numbers
(Ⅰ, Ⅲ, Ⅷ) and Latin characters enclosed in circles and parentheses.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AyWeO.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AyWeO.png)

Despite the effort of some word processors and Unicode Consortium, the support
for 丸囲み文字 has been unsatisfactory, and there were times when even the use of
simplest 丸囲み数字 was discouraged in e-mails due to a certain compatibility
issue. As a result, there characters became relatively unpopular these days.




These are called 丸囲み文字.

  * 丸囲み数字 or 丸数字 (①②③...) are very common, and their purpose is to write a numbered list of items. The equivalent in English is `(1) (2) (3)` or `i. ii. iii.`. Characters ① to ⑳ have been defined long before the introduction of Unicode, and you will see them a lot in Japanese documents.
  * Other 丸囲み文字 are just symbols that means what the enclosed kanji means. ㊊ is "Monday", ㊑ is "corporation", [㊙ is "secret"](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/43644/5010), ㊞ is "stamp/seal", and so on. Although they seem random, they are there because they have been actually used in some fields.

These characters have been used at least partly because Japanese typography
preferred characters neatly aligned in a grid. These symbols share the same
fixed width as kanji and hiragana, and it's easy to align them using the
poorest word processors. We even have fixed-width versions of Roman numbers
(Ⅰ, Ⅲ, Ⅷ) and Latin characters enclosed in circles and parentheses.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AyWeO.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AyWeO.png)

Despite the effort of some word processors and Unicode Consortium, the support
for 丸囲み文字 has been unsatisfactory, and there were times when even the use of
simplest 丸囲み数字 was discouraged in e-mails due to a certain compatibility
issue. As a result, there characters became relatively unpopular these days.

