A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode

Japan's 1978 JIS X 0208 character encoding standard contained several "ghost characters" with mysterious origins and no clear sources or pronunciations. A 1997 investigation traced most of these characters to cataloging errors—such as 妛, which resulted from a copying mistake where a line formed where two paper cutouts met—though one character, 彁, remains unexplained and was likely a misreading. These ghost characters subsequently entered Unicode and continue to perplex users today.