Variation Selectors (Unicode block)
Variation Selectors is a Unicode block containing 16 variation selectors used to specify a glyph variant for a preceding character. They are currently used to specify standardized variation sequences for mathematical symbols, emoji symbols, 'Phags-pa letters, and CJK unified ideographs corresponding to CJK compatibility ideographs. At present only standardized variation sequences with VS1, VS2, VS3, VS15 and VS16 have been defined; VS15 and VS16 are reserved to request that a character should be displayed as text or as an emoji respectively.
| Variation Selectors | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+FE00..U+FE0F (16 code points) |
| Plane | BMP |
| Scripts | Inherited |
| Assigned | 16 code points |
| Unused | 0 reserved code points |
| Unicode version history | |
| 3.2 (2002) | 16 (+16) |
| Unicode documentation | |
| Code chart ∣ Web page | |
| Note: | |
These combining characters are named variation selector-1 (for U+FE00) through to variation selector-16 (U+FE0F), and are abbreviated VS1 – VS16. Each applies to the immediately preceding character.
As of Unicode 13.0:
- CJK compatibility ideograph variation sequences contain VS1–VS3 (U+FE00–U+FE02)
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and B variation sequences contain VS1 (U+FE00) and VS2 (U+FE01)
- Emoji variation sequences contain VS16 (U+FE0F) for emoji-style (with color) or VS15 (U+FE0E) for text style (monochrome)
- Basic Latin, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms, Manichaean, Myanmar, Myanmar Extended-A, Phags-pa, and mathematical variation sequences contain only VS1 (U+FE00)
- VS4–VS14 (U+FE03–U+FE0D) are not used for any variation sequences
| Variation Selectors[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+FE0x | VS 1 |
VS 2 |
VS 3 |
VS 4 |
VS 5 |
VS 6 |
VS 7 |
VS 8 |
VS 9 |
VS 10 |
VS 11 |
VS 12 |
VS 13 |
VS 14 |
VS 15 |
VS 16 |
Notes
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This list is continued in the Variation Selectors Supplement.