Enclosed Alphanumerics is aUnicode block oftypographical symbols of analphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop.

It is currently fully allocated. Within theBasic Multilingual Plane, a few additional enclosed numerals are in theDingbats and theEnclosed CJK Letters and Months blocks. There is also a block with more of these characters in theSupplementary Multilingual Plane namedEnclosed Alphanumeric Supplement (U+1F100–U+1F1FF), as ofUnicode 6.0.

Many of these characters were originally intended for use as bullets for lists.^[3] The parenthesized forms are historically based on typewriter approximations of the circled versions.^[3] Although these roles have been supplanted by styles and other markup in "rich text" contexts, the characters are included in the Unicode standard "for interoperability with the legacy East Asian character sets and for the occasional text context where such symbols otherwise occur."^[3] The Unicode Standard considers these characters to be distinct from characters which are similar in form but specialized in purpose, such as thecircled C,P orR characters which are defined as copyright and trademark symbols or thecircled a used for an at sign.^[3]

A circled s (Ⓢ) was used in documents circa 1900 printed by German missionaries, especially theBasel Mission, in theMalayalam language to denote aditto mark.^[4]

The Enclosed Alphanumerics block contains oneemoji:U+24C2, the enclosed M used as a symbol formask works.^[5][6]

It defaults to a text presentation and has twostandardized variants defined to specify text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) or emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16).^[7]

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

• Special characters:
  • Enclosed C
  • Enclosed A
  • Copyright symbol
  • Registered trademark symbol
  • Sound recording copyright symbol
  • At sign (partially enclosed A)
• Character sets:
  • Japanese rebus monogram
  • Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement
  • Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (extends enclosed Arabic decimal numbers to ㊿)

• Typographical symbols
• Unicode blocks

• CS1 Malayalam-language sources (ml)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata