U+3238 "㈸" Parenthesized Ideograph Labor Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
㈸
U+3238 "㈸" Parenthesized Ideograph Labor is a CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) compatibility ideograph enclosed in a pair of parentheses, specifically representing the character for "labor" or "work." It was included in the Unicode standard primarily for compatibility with pre-existing East Asian character sets, such as those used in Japanese industrial or business contexts, where it functioned as an abbreviation or symbol within narrow character widths. This character is rarely used in modern digital text but may appear in legacy documents, signage, or specialized systems that required compact representations of common terms.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+3238 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Parenthesized Ideograph Labor |
| Block | Enclosed CJK Letters and Months |
| General Category | Other Symbol |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Compat |
| Decomposition Mapping | "(" U+0028 Left Parenthesis "労" U+52B4 CJK Unified Ideograph-# ")" U+0029 Right Parenthesis |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ㈸ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ㈸ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x88 0xB8 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x3238 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00003238 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u3238 |