Duang

There has been much buzz about the invented word duang. It consists of both a Chinese character (well actually two) and a romanized form. The romanized form has even acquired the Chinese 1st tone, duāng

The Chinese character is constructed from Jackie Chan's Chinese name which has both Simplified and Traditional Chinese forms - Simplified ➛ 成龙 and Traditional ➛成龍. The Chinese character for duāng is constructed by placing the first character on top of the second to form a single composite character. Using Ideographic Description Characters, the two new duāng characters can be represented as the sequences:

• ⿱成龙
• ⿱成龍

What few realise is that there exists a font which contains glyphs for the duāng Chinese characters - BabelStone Han PUA babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/PUA.html. This font maps glyphs to codepoints in the Unicode PUA (Private Use Area) in the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). PUA codepoints can be used for any purpose by anyone, unlike the other codepoints which have to go through an approval process before they can be used. This font maps it's two duāng glyphs to PUA codepoints U+F4E2 and U+F4E3.

I installed BabelStone Han PUA font and here is how the duāng characters look in TextEdit on my iMac.

Update: The two duāng glyphs (using the same PUA codepoints U+F4E2 and U+F4E3 ) are also available in font BabelStone Han babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Han.html