Enclosed CJK Letters and Months

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months is a Unicode block containing circled and parenthesized Katakana, Hangul, and CJK ideographs. During the unification with ISO 10646 for version 1.1, the Japanese Industrial Standard Symbol was reassigned from the code point U+32FF at the end of the block to U+3004. Also included in the block are miscellaneous glyphs that would more likely fit in CJK Compatibility or Enclosed Alphanumerics: a few unit abbreviations, circled numbers from 21 to 50, and circled multiples of 10 from 10 to 80 enclosed in black squares (representing speed limit signs).

This block specialises on the CJK symbols which are written inside a circle, in other words, enclosed.

Going back to the basics, what is CJK? In the context of internationalisation, it is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, which include Chinese characters.

The age of the Chinese script is constantly under clarification. In 1962 during the archeological digging of the Neolithic settlement of Jiahu on the Yellow River, there was made a discovery about the inscriptions on turtle shells resembling the ancient Chinese hieroglyphs. The pictograms date back to the VI millennium BC, which is even older than Sumerian writing. Previously, a well-known researcher of Chinese writing, Tang Lan, suggested that Chinese hieroglyphics originated 4-5 millennia ago. In a nutshell, there is plenty of information to research.

As you might know, Chinese writing tends to be called hieroglyphic and ideographic. It is radically different from the alphabetic one in terms of characters, as each character is assigned a particular meaning, not only phonetic, but semiotic too. The number of such characters is huge and it may account up to 10 000 and more! That's why studying Chinese may be challenging for those who have only encountered European languages. I once attended a workshop on Chinese for beginners. The teacher told us that to learn Chinese, “you have to reshape your way of thinking” in order to comprehend the concepts. Sounds impressive, right? So if you decide to study it too, you know where to find the characters. This block offers a huge variety of them and comes in handy, if you don't plan to change your keyboard. Just copy these symbols and paste wherever you need to.