Emphasis mark
The emphasis mark, emphasis dot, kenten or boten is a List of typographical symbols and [punctuation marks|typographic mark] used in some East Asian languages to indicate emphasis. The markings can take many forms, such as dots or bullets, circles, or triangles. They were more commonly used historically, but with the rise of modern technology, it is now common to use quotation marks or change the font style.
Chinese
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.Japanese
In Japan, the emphasis mark 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, but this feature has not been possible with CSS.
Korean
In South Korea, the emphasis mark 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.
Vietnamese
In Vietnam, the emphasis mark was written with various marks such as a dot, circle, or a sesame dot. It is commonly positioned to the right of the character. After Vietnam switched to the Latin alphabet, emphasis marks fell into disuse as bolding, underlining, and italics replaced the usage of emphasis marks.- :定?科次固??空
Định làm khoa thứ có là trời không
Characters
Apart from any single character, the following characters are used as emphasis marks in some implementations.| 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 |