Religious and political symbols in Unicode
Unicode contains a number of characters that represent various cultural, political, and religious symbols.
Most, but not all, of these symbols are in the Miscellaneous Symbols block.
The majority of them are treated as graphic symbols that are not characters. [1] 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 (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 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 block, which was only encoded for compatibility and is not recommended for use in regular Arabic text.[2]
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).[3]
Armenian block[]
The Unicode chart for the Armenian block notes two religious symbols:[4]
Symbol Code point Name ֍ U+058D RIGHT-FACING ARMENIAN ETERNITY SIGN ֎ U+058E LEFT-FACING ARMENIAN ETERNITY SIGN
Dingbats block[]
The Dingbats block also contains some symbols with political/religious connotations:[5]
Symbol Code point Name ✙ U+2719 OUTLINED GREEK CROSS ✚ U+271A HEAVY GREEK CROSS ✛ U+271B OPEN CENTER CROSS ✜ U+271C HEAVY OPEN CENTER CROSS ✝ U+271D LATIN CROSS ✞ U+271E SHADOWED WHITE LATIN CROSS ✟ U+271F OUTLINED LATIN CROSS ✠ U+2720 MALTESE CROSS ✡ U+2721 STAR OF DAVID
Geometric Shapes Extended[]
Other weights of the Greek cross are in Geometric Shapes Extended.
Symbol Code point Name