Several characters in Japan's JIS X 0208 encoding standard were added in 1978 with no clear origin or pronunciation, earning the nickname "ghost characters." A 1997 investigation traced most of them to cataloging errors in massive administrative reference documents.
Background
JIS X 0208 is a Japanese industrial standard that defines character encoding for kanji, kana, and symbols, and remains a foundational reference for Japanese text processing in Unicode.
- Source
- hackernews
- Published
- Aug 15, 2026 at 10:34 PM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10