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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.

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  • 5
    How about the letters "C" and "A"?
    – anon
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:16
  • 22
    So you, if we answer "no", you expect us to prove it by checking every unicode character? In other words, you want us to do the work for you?
    – Chris Dunaway
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:18
  • 7
    @Neil If you use A they'll get confused and say WTF is the Asteroids ship doing in PACMAN???
    – vivin
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:22
  • 6
    @Chris: No, he's saying that if you're not sure, don't say "no". That's pretty reasonable.
    – Tim Sullivan
    Sep 29, 2010 at 17:20
  • 2
    We've come a long way since this was originally posted -- now Pacman is just about* the only thing we don't have! 👻 Ghost 🍒 Cherry 🍓 Strawberry 🍊 Orange 🍎 Apple 🍉 Melon 🔔 Bell 🔑 Key (* ok, and the Galaxian Boss...)
    – A C
    Mar 22, 2017 at 21:25

12 Answers 12

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71

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.

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  • 10
    Good find. ᗣ is U+15E3, ᗤ U+15E4, and ᗧ U+15E7. They're labeled as CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER TTO, TTE, and TTA, respectively.
    – eswald
    Apr 18, 2012 at 16:55
  • 24
    Hence, Pᗣᗧ•••MᗣN ?
    – Gnubie
    Apr 10, 2013 at 17:02
  • 5
    Hence 2, ᗧ•••ᗣ••
    – Aviel Gross
    Mar 29, 2015 at 17:30
  • 12
    ·····•····· ᗤ ᗣᗣᗣᗣ
    – Darth Android
    Jun 20, 2015 at 5:34
  • 6
    ᗧ·····🍒······ᗣ
    – Aleks Dorohovich
    Mar 25, 2019 at 5:04
11

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

DF Strand

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10

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:

◔
◕
◴ ◵ ◶ ◷

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2
  • I like the first one you posed; I used it and it is close enough to Pac-Man; you can definitely see the resemblance! Thanks :)
    – Ricket
    Jun 9, 2010 at 18:13
  • The copyright symbol looks more like it than those ;-) Or the letter C
    – barlop
    Dec 8, 2017 at 18:28
10

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.

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7

This is the most similar I could find:

ᗧ

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7

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

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6

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.

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  • 4
    What about the snowman? ☃ He's kind of an amusing character.
    – mipadi
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:16
  • 2
    I mentioned the snowman as an example of an oddball character that's in a legacy character set.
    – JSBձոգչ
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:20
  • 3
    @mipadi: The snowman is a weather symbol.
    – Joey
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:21
  • 8
    What about emojis? Do they all map to some legacy Unicode code point?
    – CodeManX
    Apr 8, 2016 at 1:04
  • 3
    This is now outdated, what with 💩 and emojis.
    – Piskvor left the building
    Oct 10, 2018 at 7:43
5

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?

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2
  • 9
    I guess they didn't want to put that much effort in it :)
    – Joey
    Jun 9, 2010 at 17:23
  • 6
    Thanks for contributing nothing with a low-effort "answer".
    – Navin
    Dec 28, 2016 at 5:20
5

( *< • • •

^ closest I can get to making Pacman with text

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4

ଓ

I think this looks like Pac-Man!

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2

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

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3
  • Hmm, it doesn’t look like a ghost. o.O
    – Synetech
    Dec 21, 2012 at 21:31
  • @Synetech Eh, kinda. This is what it looks like in my browser.
    – Bob
    Jun 14, 2013 at 2:59
  • 2
    It depends on the font. Different browsers use different default styles and thus font families.
    – CodeManX
    Apr 8, 2016 at 1:05
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

:) ☕

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