U+FE61 "﹡" Small Asterisk Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
﹡
U+FE61 "﹡" Small Asterisk is a small version of the standard asterisk symbol, belonging to the Small Form Variants block, which provides smaller versions of punctuation marks for compatibility with East Asian typography, particularly in vertical text or narrow contexts. It is typically used in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) text layouts where a compact asterisk is needed to fit within character spacing without breaking the visual flow. The character is distinct from the regular asterisk U+002A due to its reduced size and intended placement in ideographic text environments.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+FE61 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Small Asterisk |
| Block | Small Form Variants |
| General Category | Other Punctuation |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Other Neutral |
| Decomposition Type | Small |
| Decomposition Mapping | "*" U+002A Asterisk |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ﹡ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ﹡ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xEF 0xB9 0xA1 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xFE61 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000FE61 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ufe61 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFD Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Ideographic |
| East Asian Width | Wide |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "*" U+002A Asterisk |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "*" U+002A Asterisk |
| Script | Common |
| Script Extensions | Common |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| Math | Yes |
| Other Math | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Upright |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Other |
| Sentence Break | Other |