54

Simple question: is there a character that looks either like Pac-Man, or like the ghost in Pac-Man?

With Google's recent Pac-Man logo, everyone should know what these look like, but in case you don't here are some sample images:

enter image description here enter image description here

If you answer "no" please provide a little more proof that you actually searched all unicode characters...

Example of what I'm looking for: If I were to ask, "is there a character that looks like a sun", I would expect an answer along the lines of "Yes, ☼ and according to charmap it is U+263C". That's what I'm looking for, but with Pac-Man or the ghost...

Usage: I would like to paste this symbol into a web form textbox in order for it to show on a webpage. This is a one-line textbox, so a complex ASCII art "image" isn't acceptable in this case.

Gareth
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Ricket
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12 Answers12

73

ᗤ <- pacman, also a ghost ᗣ got here by google, someone else will be looking for it, don't remember the unicode for it but i copied the characters from a old file.

thomas
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On 1/25/2022 Pacman glyph in all (four) directions got accepted to Unicode as part of the 731 legacy computing symbols proposed in L2/21-235 in a new block named "Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement" for a future version of the Unicode standard.

See pages 22 and 26 in above linked proposal; under "Game Sprites" symbols 1CC6B to 1CC6E.

Game Sprites

This was announced by The Unicode Consortium on Twitter, and the codepoints were officially added to Unicode 16.0 released on the 10th of September 2024. The four pacman-shaped codepoints are: left , up , right , and down (although you may not have any fonts which support them).

Vaelus
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blami
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12

I know it's not quite what you asked, but Pacman makes an appearance in the discotastic DF Strand Midnight typeface.

DF Strand

paradroid
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11

It's not looking good -- presumably, anything resembling Pac-Man would be in the "Geometric Shapes" block, but the closest you'll get is a circle that's 1/4 filled:

◔
◕
◴ ◵ ◶ ◷

Mark Rushakoff
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11

For finding unicode symbols that look like things, I use the shapecatcher.com website. It allows you to draw an example and then does an image search. Though you may need to use a few tries to find what you're looking for. This is surprisingly handy to use, for example I've used it to look for unicode characters that look like application icons.

If I draw a crude left-facing Pacman outline, about half-way through the results I get the

Canadian syllabics carrier tte: ᗤ

as found in the top answer.

Community
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user1151080
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7

This is the most similar I could find:

ᗧ

WhyNotHugo
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5

No. Unicode does not provide amusing characters just for the fun of it--all of the wacky characters in Unicode (like the snowman and the sun) are there because some legacy encoding included them.

No legacy character set ever had a Pac-Man character. Hence, Pac-Man is not in Unicode.

If you're trying to find out if there's some oddball character that kinda-sorta resembles Pac-Man, you'll have to look through all of the codepages yourself.

Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style
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JSBձոգչ
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5

( *< • • •

^ closest I can get to making Pacman with text

Cody
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4

No.

If you answer "no" please provide a little more proof that you actually searched all unicode characters...

Did you search all the unicode characters?

Timothy
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4

ଓ

I think this looks like Pac-Man!

Gareth
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2

I know CSS3 is kind'a cheating but could not resist rotating 45deg.. and adding animation to make pack-man "chew"..

https://jsbin.com/nasexevolo/edit?html,css,output

it's also content-dynamic, since you can place any two symbos in state-a and state-b

:) ☕

1

The list of characters slated for Unicode 6.0 includes U+1F47B GHOST.

user46971
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