Enclosed Alphanumerics

Enclosed Alphanumerics is a Unicode block (a group of symbols in Unicode). It has 160 symbols. Most of the symbols in the block are letters and numbers inside of circles or in parentheses. In the first Unicode plane (Basic Multilingual Plane), the blocks Dingbats and Enclosed CJK Letters and Months have more numbers inside of circles. In the next plane, the block Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement has symbols of letters inside of more circles, parentheses, and squares.

Many of the symbols were made to be used as bullets when writing lists.^[1] The numbers and letters in parentheses were made to look like how typewriters showed numbers and letters in circles.^[1] Unicode was made to think that the characters in this block look different than similar copyright symbols (for example, the copyright symbol (left) and the enclosed C (right): © and Ⓒ).^[1] The circled S (Ⓢ) was used by German missionaries at around 1900 as a symbol for the ditto mark.^[2]

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} The Unicode Standard, 6.0.1
2. ↑ Joseph Muliyil; M Krishnan (1904). "Contents". The New Malayalam Reader (in Malayalam). Mangalore: Basel Mission Book and Tract Repository. p. vii.