A maru is the Japanese symbol for "right" or "correct." It is a circle. Often used in children's anime and other mass-market Japanese TV. Contrast with batsu, or "X", which is used to mean "wrong." An upward-pointing equilateral triangle is used to mean "maybe" or "sometimes" in the same context. I'm not sure what the square, L1, L2, R1, R2, Select, or Start mean; Sony probably chose them for different reasons.


Thanks to fhayashi for correcting an earlier error with this write-up: a maru is a symbol, not a character.

Japanese for "circle." Written 丸 in kanji. There are three different "maru" symbols in Japanese.

One is written 〇 and can alternately mean "correct" (similar to a check or tick in English) or "zero" (especially in prices, such as 一〇〇円 "one hundred yen"). This maru is also sometimes used to censor offensive words, much as asterisks are used in English.

One is written 。 and is used in the same way as an English period. Unlike the Chinese full stop, the maru is kept close to the preceding sentence, rather than equidistant from both sentences.

The last one is a diacritic added to kana characters to change "h" sounds into "p" sounds (ほ ho becomes ぽ po... thanks to shro0m for pointing that out).

Maru is also a designation for ship names: cf. Ehime Maru or Kobayashi Maru.

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