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Two kinds of kana written around a Chinese character, one an annotation and one part of the word.
Furigana is set at about half size above the character in horizontal text or to its right in vertical text, and it tells you how to pronounce the character. Okurigana is full size and follows the character on the line, and it is part of the word itself, carrying the inflection. Reading okurigana as a pronunciation gloss, or furigana as part of the word, changes what is said aloud.
Furigana is half-size and an annotation above the character; okurigana is full-size and part of the word.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Furigana | Okurigana |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | letter like, lines and dots | letter like |
| Furigana | Okurigana | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | About half the size of the base text. | Full size. |
| Position | Above the character, or to its right in vertical text. | After the character, on the line. |
| Part of the word | No — an annotation. | Yes — it carries the inflection. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Okurigana — Furigana is half-size and an annotation above the character; okurigana is full-size and part of the word. | Commonly confused with Furigana — Okurigana is full-size and part of the word; furigana is half-size and an annotation above it. |
East Asian typography, punctuation and reading marks
The Unicode Consortium and East Asian typographic standards bodies · retrieved 2026-08-27
Cited for the identity, encoded form and typographic behaviour of East Asian punctuation and reading marks. Layout requirements differ between Chinese, Japanese and Korean practice and a record names the tradition it describes.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.
A single C in a circle asserts copyright. Two C shapes mark a Creative Commons licence — which grants specific permissions while the creator keeps their copyright. A CC badge does not put a work in the public domain, and it does not tell you what you may do on its own: the condition marks beside it carry the terms.