Nushu is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

containing characters from the Nüshu script, which is a

syllabary In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words. A symbol in a syllaba ...

derived from

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in

Hunan Hunan is an inland Provinces of China, province in Central China. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the Administrative divisions of China, province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to the east, Gu ...

province of southern

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. An

iteration mark Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word. Chinese In Chinese, or (usually appearing as , equivalent to the modern ideograph ) or is used in casual writing to represent a doubled char ...

for Nüshu is encoded in the

Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation marks used by ideographic scripts such as Tangut and Nüshu. History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining ...

block at U+16FE1. For technical reasons "Nüshu" is spelled as "Nushu" in the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard. Nüshu characters do not have descriptive character names, but have names derived algorithmically from their code point value (e.g. U+1B170 is named NUSHU CHARACTER-1B170).

Block

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Nushu block:

Fonts

As of 28 March 2024, 3 fonts are known to support Nūshu: * Noto Sans Nushu. *Noto Traditional Nushu. *Unicode Nushu.

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks