Bidirectional marks
ARABIC LETTER MARK (U+061C)
An invisible mark with the direction of an Arabic letter, added in Unicode 6.3 for cases where a right-to-left mark is not quite strong enough.
- Codepoint
U+061C- Also written as
u061c\u061c؜- Category
- Bidirectional marks
- Removed by default
- When free-floating
- Governing option
- Bidi marks
--bidi - Can be load-bearing
- Yes
Copy and paste U+061C
To copy and paste ARABIC LETTER MARK (U+061C), press the button: the character itself goes to your clipboard, and Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) pastes it anywhere you can type.
Where it comes from
Arabic and Syriac text where numbers and punctuation meet letters, usually inserted by localisation tooling rather than typed.
Why it matters
It is newer and rarer than U+200F, so filters and reviewers frequently miss it, and it is invisible in every context.
Before and after
No Arabic in sight, so the mark has nothing to disambiguate.
The character is shown as a labelled chip so you can see where it sits. In your text it draws nothing at all.
When it is legitimate
Adjacent to Arabic-script text, where it disambiguates the direction of an adjacent number or punctuation mark.
How to remove it
Removed by the default pass when no neighbour is right-to-left; kept and reported when one is; `--bidi` removes it regardless.
Working in a file rather than a paste? The document report for .docx, .odt and .html finds it inside the file, together with hidden runs and tracked changes, without you having to open it. If the question is what the rest of the writing does rather than what this one character does, count the tell words and phrases per thousand words and see where each habit sits, with no score and no claim about who wrote the text.
Is it an AI watermark?
Not a watermark
No. A bidi control specific to Arabic-script layout. Its presence suggests localisation tooling, nothing more.
No connection to machine-generated text. It comes from software, from a keyboard, or from a person.
Questions
How is it different from a right-to-left mark?
U+200F has the direction of a generic right-to-left character; U+061C has the direction of an Arabic letter specifically, which matters for how adjacent digits are laid out.
Why do other tools miss it?
It was added in Unicode 6.3 and sits far from the other bidi controls in the codespace, so hard-coded lists often stop at U+200E/U+200F.
Check your own text
Paste anything into the cleaner to see every hidden character it contains, with position, codepoint and what happens to each one. Nothing is uploaded.
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