Collections
The five departments are written one entry at a time. These are not. A collection is a body of symbols that already exists somewhere as structured data — a standards file, a locale database, a code of signals — presented whole, with its source stated and nothing added.
The Institute writes no interpretation into these pages beyond the framing. Where a row says something, it is because the record says it: the alchemical notation is still being extended; seventy-six characters across twenty-four scripts render as the letter o; every language that names ☯ makes a different decision about whether to translate it.
The Alchemical block
Everything that survived of an ungoverned notation, as Unicode recorded it — including the twelve characters added after 2010, for bodies discovered centuries after alchemy ended.
Colour associations
The Archetypes department asserts that one form carries opposite meanings across cultures. This is the evidence, one colour-culture-domain at a time — and the flip is queryable rather than claimed.
Confusables
The Atlas builds a confusion cabinet one entry at a time. Unicode maintains the same thing at scale, for a harder reason: characters that look alike can forge a domain name.
Currency symbols
Forty marks that denote a value system, with the codepoint that encodes each one. Most are a letter from the currency's own name with strokes added — the convention is almost universal and almost never stated.
Which floor you are on
Seventy-four countries call the floor you walk in on zero. Fourteen call it the first. The lift button is a number whose meaning changes at the border, and this is where it changes.
National symbols
Birds, flowers, trees, mottoes and beasts, by country and by kind — and the finding is how few are actually official. Most national symbols are widely cited rather than designated, and the register separates the two.
One symbol, fifty languages
Unicode gives every character one official English name, fixed forever. CLDR records what each symbol is actually called, language by language. Where the names disagree is where the meaning does.
Signal flags
Each flag here was drawn from its blazon alone, never copied from a chart — which makes the page a working demonstration of the Heraldry entry.
The symbol blocks
Unicode classifies blocks by codespace and never by purpose. Sorting them by what they are for produces the finding: notation and machines are the two largest families.
Standardised symbols
Marks a jurisdiction requires you to use, with the instrument that requires them. The finding is what is missing: GHS mandates colour roles and specifies no colour value at all.
The intake
Encoding is the closest thing symbols have to a legislative record: a proposal is filed, argued, accepted or refused, and the result is dated.