‘Ghost kanji’ lurk in the Japanese lexicon

There was also a nice discussion about Ghost Kanji a few months back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637375

A spectre is haunting unicode:

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

In another example of ghost characters, someone couldn't spell Baht correctly [1]. And typos are frequent as ever [2].

Unicode is full of such mistakes, now stabilized thanks to the Stability Policy [3]. Thankfully having some character mistakenly encoded and/or named in Unicode seems to hurt virtually no one.

[1] https://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2016/03/bahts-is-parts.html

[2] https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn27/

[3] https://unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html

I'm a little surprised that these haven't gained any sort of meaning over the years. For example, the Japanese version of Prince could change his name to 彁 and people would have to refer to him as "The artist formerly known as 王子"

Nice! let me try to guessduct where this ghost character 彁 came from... it was in the 70's ,maybe something to do with the soda pop named coca-cola, was written in some old sign in a vertical way? : ) if you take a look at their logo , maybe the ghost of someone who died of thirst , was the thirsty ghost and wrote something like : : 口可 (mouth thirsty?) twice in the wall with a brush...Its interesting to read the story about how the chinese name of coca-cola was choosen. Other theory is that it was a karaoke singing ghost who died of boredom after the beer finished...may have something to do with "brother" or "turtle" haha, who knows...anyway very interesting read this post on japantimes is.

Hovered over the words with my dictionary extension to find that they're also referred to as "jabberwocky words" which I personally think is a more apt name.

Interestingly, the dictionary also gives them readings. I wonder how they come up with them?

https://i.imgur.com/14N8yo1.png

So the unicode standard doesn't have a way to deprecate/remove characters?