Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

contains a number of characters that represent various cultural,

political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

, and

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

symbols. Most, but not all, of these symbols are in the

Miscellaneous Symbols Miscellaneous Symbols is a Unicode block (U+2600–U+26FF) containing glyphs representing concepts from a variety of categories: astrological, astronomical, chess, dice, musical notation, political symbols, recycling, religious symbols, trigr ...

block. The majority 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 卐 (U+5350), the swastika encoded as a

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanj ...

(although it is also encoded as a religious symbol at U+0FD5); or ॐ (U+0950), the Om symbol which is, strictly speaking, a

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

ligature. A special case is ﷲ (U+FDF2), which is a special ligature of Arabic script used only for writing of the word '' Allah''. This ligature is in the

Arabic Presentation Forms-A Arabic Presentation Forms-A is a Unicode block encoding contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. This block also allocates 32 noncharacters in Unicode, designed specifically f ...

block, which was only encoded for compatibility 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).

Armenian block

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

Dingbats block

The

Dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or as ...

s block also contains some symbols with political/religious connotations: :

Geometric Shapes Extended

Other weights of the Greek cross are in Geometric Shapes Extended. :

Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block

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

Miscellaneous Symbols block

The Unicode chart for the

block has a section explicitly labelled "Religious and political symbols": : Elsewhere in the block is: : The emoji variants have U+FE0F after the symbol.

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 Progressive ankylosis protein homolog (ANK ilosis H omolog) is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''ANKH'' gene. This gene encodes a multipass transmembrane protein that is expressed in joints and other tissues and controls pyrophosphat ...

, all of which originate in polytheistic religious traditions.

Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block

The Unicode chart for the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block notes one religious symbol": :

Tibetan block

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

Soyombo block

The Soyombo symbol is a special character in the

Soyombo alphabet The Soyombo script ( mn, Соёмбо бичиг, ''Soyombo biçig'') is an abugida developed by the monk and scholar Zanabazar in 1686 to write Mongolian. It can also be used to write Tibetan and Sanskrit. A special character of the script, the ...

devised for the

Mongolian language Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and both the most widely spoken and best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residen ...

. It appears in several flags of Mongolia. Three forms appear in the Soyombo block. * * *

References

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