x200D

x200D refers to the Unicode code point U+200D, commonly known as the ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ). It is a non-printing formatting character used to indicate that the preceding and following characters should be joined in rendering, forming a single unit where appropriate. The character itself has no visible glyph.

Technical details: U+200D is categorized as a non-spacing, formatting character. In UTF-8 its encoding is the three-byte sequence E2 80 8D. In HTML it can be inserted with the numeric character reference ‍ or decimal reference ‍. In practice, the ZWJ does not appear as a visible symbol, but it affects how adjacent characters are displayed as a connected sequence.

Usage and effects: The ZWJ is used to create ligatures or joined forms in certain writing systems, such as scripts where letters are designed to connect (for example, Arabic and Devanagari contexts), and to form complex emoji sequences. Modern emoji rely on ZWJ to compose multi-part icons like families or gendered/emotion variants, by combining individual emoji elements into a single grapheme. It is also employed in some text processing tasks to influence shaping and ligature formation.

Rendering and compatibility: Rendering of x200D depends on fonts and rendering engines. Some systems may not display any change if the font does not support joined glyphs or if the sequence is not recognized as a multi-part emoji. Some text-processing pipelines may strip or mishandle non-printing characters, so handling ZWJ requires careful normalization and validation in software that processes Unicode.

See also: zero width non-joiner (U+200C), grapheme cluster concepts, and emoji ZWJ sequences.