Emphasis mark explained

The emphasis mark^[1] or emphasis dot^[2] is a typographic marking used in some East Asian languages to indicate emphasis. The markings takes in many forms like, a dot or a bullet, a circle, or a triangle. It was used more traditionally, but nowadays, with technology, quotations or changing of font style prevails.

In Chinese

事業是 幹出來的，不是吹出來的。 看來，他彷佛用 一千隻眼睛瞧著。

In China and Hong Kong, the emphasis mark is used in textbooks and teaching materials. It is centred under each character highlighted in the horizontal texts, and centred to the right of each character in the vertical texts.

In Japanese

ここを強調

In Japan, the emphasis mark (Japanese: 傍点 Japanese: bōten or Japanese: 圏点 Japanese: kenten) is usually a dot or a sesame dot and is centred above each character in the horizontal texts and to the right of each character in the vertical texts.

It is not unusual for kenten and ruby to concur on the same side of the main text (usually above or to the right), but this feature has not been possible with CSS.

In Korean

In South Korea, the emphasis mark (Korean: [[wikt:드러냄표|드러냄표]] Korean: deureonaempyo) usually rules as a dot or circle centred above the characters in the horizontal texts and to the right of the characters in the vertical texts.

Examples:

• using the CSS property:

한글의 본 이름은

훈민정음이다.

중요한 것은

왜 사느냐가 아니라 어떻게 사느냐 하는 문제이다.

• using positioned characters: :

한글의 본 이름은 •훈•민•정•음이다.

중요한 것은 ◦왜 ◦사◦느◦냐◦가 아니라 ◦어◦떻◦게 ◦사◦느◦냐 하는 문제이다.

Characters

Apart from any single character, the following characters are used as emphasis marks in some implementations.^[3]

Glyph	Unicode codepoint	Unicode name	Value for the CSS property	Name used in Adobe InDesign
•	U+2022		,,	small black circle
◦	U+25E6		,	small white circle
●	U+25CF		,	black circle
○	U+25CB			white circle
◉	U+25C9		,	fisheye
◎	U+25CE			bullseye
▲	U+25B2		,	black triangle
△	U+25B3			white triangle
﹅	U+FE45		,	black sesame
﹆	U+FE46			white sesame

See also

• Chinese punctuation
• Japanese punctuation
• Korean punctuation

References

• Book: Lunde, Ken. CJKV Information Processing. O'Reilly. 2009. 978-0-596-51447-1. en. 1999.
• Book: 한글 맞춤법. Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. 1988. ko. 2019-03-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20140221184453/http://www.korean.go.kr/09_new/data/etc_view.jsp?idx=271. 2014-02-21. dead.
• Web site: 한글 맞춤법: VI. 드러냄표. ko. 2019-03-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20140201204800/http://www.korean.go.kr/09_new/dic/rule/rule01_0706.jsp. 2014-02-01. dead.

Notes and References

1. CSS Working Group . Etemad . Elika J. . Ishii . Koji . 2022-05-05 . CSS Text Decoration Module Level 3 . . 2024-01-24 . 1999-01-27. |version=Candidate Recommendation Draft, 5 May 2022}}
2. Book: Japanese Layout Task Force. Requirements for Japanese Text Layout. W3C. 2012. en. jlreq.
3. Web site: text-emphasis. 2021-04-08. MDN Web Docs.