Religious and political symbols in Unicode

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Unicode contains a number characters that represent various cultural, political, and religious symbols. Most but not all of these are in the Miscellaneous Symbols block.

Most of them are treated as graphic symbols that are not characters. Exceptions to this include characters in certain writing systems that are also in use as political or religious symbols, such as ? (U+0FD5), the swastika encoded as a Chinese character; or ? (U+0950), the Om symbol which is strictly speaking a Devanagari ligature. A special case is ? (U+FDF2), which is a special ligature of Arabic script used only for writing of the word Allah. It is in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block which was encoded for compatibility only and is not recommended for use in regular Arabic text.

Unicode defines the semantics of a character by its character identity and its normative properties, one of these being the character's general category, given as a two-letter code (e.g. Lu for "uppercase letter"). Characters that fall in the "political or religious" category are given the "general category" So, which is the catch-all category for "Symbol, other", i.e. anything considered a "symbol" which does not fall in any of the three other categories of Sm (mathematical symbols), Sc (currency symbols) or Sk (phonetic modifier symbols, i.e. IPA signs not considered letters).

Video Religious and political symbols in Unicode

Armenian block

The Unicode chart for the Armenian block notes two religious symbols:

Maps Religious and political symbols in Unicode

Dingbats block

The Dingbats block also contains some symbols with political/religious connotations:

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Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block

The Unicode chart for the Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block notes several symbols used for Chinese folk religion:

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Miscellaneous Symbols block

The Unicode chart for the Miscellaneous Symbols block has a section explicitly labelled "Religious and political symbols":

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Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block

The Unicode chart for the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block notes many religious symbols:

Ostensibly religious symbols are, however, not limited to this section, as the same chart has another short section of two characters labelled "Syriac cross symbols", with the explanatory gloss "These symbols are used in liturgical texts of Syriac-speaking churches". Another short section of two symbols is headed "Medical and healing symbols", including U+2624 ? Caduceus (c.f. U+1F750 ? "alchemical symbol for caduceus"), U+2695 ? "staff of Aesculapius and U+2625 ? Ankh, all of which originate in religious (polytheistic) tradition.

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Tibetan block

The Unicode chart for the Tibetan block notes several religious symbols:

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References

Source of the article : Wikipedia