U+3300 "㌀" Square Apaato Unicode Character
U+3300 "㌀" Square Apaato is a precomposed CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) square character that represents the word "apartment" as a single glyph, specifically used in Japanese text. It falls within the CJK Compatibility block, which was designed to encode legacy character forms from earlier East Asian character sets for compatibility purposes. This character is an ideographic telegraph symbol, originally included to support the transmission of the term "apāto" (a loanword from English) in Japanese telegraphy and older computer systems. In practice, "㌀" functions as a compact, single-cell representation of the longer string of characters "アパート" and is still occasionally seen in signage, advertising, or digital contexts where space efficiency is desired.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+3300 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Square Apaato |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Squared Apaato |
| Block | CJK Compatibility |
| General Category | Other Symbol |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Square |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ア" U+30A2 Katakana Letter A "パ" U+30D1 Katakana Letter Pa "ー" U+30FC Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark "ト" U+30C8 Katakana Letter To |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ㌀ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ㌀ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x8C 0x80 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x3300 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00003300 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u3300 |