The Ghost Characters Haunting Unicode
A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode
In 1978, Japan's JIS X 0208 standard introduced several kanji with no clear origin, later dubbed 'ghost characters.' A 1997 investigation traced most to cataloging errors, like a mistaken stroke from pasted paper. Only one, 彁, remains unexplained, likely a misreading. These ghosts now lurk in every computer via Unicode, a permanent glitch in digital text.
The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables.