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Potential spoilers for readers of Jojo, but in the top-left-hand corner of this picture there are dots above the word こいつ.

enter image description here

Why do some manga have dots above some of the words? I've only noticed this in Jojo so far but perhaps it's in other manga too.

Earthliŋ
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Anon
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  • Possible duplicate of [Why are points used where furigana would be normally?](http://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/15270/1628) – Earthliŋ Oct 27 '16 at 06:56

2 Answers2

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This is the Japanese version of [underlining]{LLLLLLLLLLL}. It's a way of marking a word for emphasis.

Update

The Japanese name for this is variously 圏点{けんてん} (literally "enclosing mark"), 傍点{ぼうてん} ("off-to-the-side mark"), or 脇点{わきてん} ("on-the-side mark"). The JA wikipedia has a good article about this.

Veteran user snailplane commented with this meta link, which shows how to use Japanese emphasis, like this: [強調]{﹅﹅}.

Community
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Eiríkr Útlendi
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  • http://meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/806/how-should-i-format-my-questions-on-japanese-language-se/1294#1294 –  Oct 26 '16 at 22:36
  • @snailplane, thanks, but what I was lamenting was the inability to use or other underlining for non-Japanese text. This{LLLL} doesn't work, for instance. – Eiríkr Útlendi Oct 26 '16 at 23:09
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    Hmm, how about [this]{LLLL}? –  Oct 26 '16 at 23:11
  • @snailplane -- what did you do in your edit? It works now! But the side-by-side marked-up edit summary view doesn't show me any changes...?? – Eiríkr Útlendi Oct 27 '16 at 01:00
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    Sorry, I didn't have time to reply and explain. I'll do that now. The examples in the meta post have a zero-width space before the { to prevent it from working, as explained [here](http://meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/a/807/1478), because otherwise you wouldn't be able to see what the markup looks like. You copied and pasted it including that zero-width space, which prevented it from working, but if you simply type it in, it should work fine. –  Oct 27 '16 at 01:59
  • Gah. How frustrating. Why not use the entity instead of the literal character? That's at least visible when viewing the source in **Edit** mode. Oh, well. Thank you for the fix! – Eiríkr Útlendi Oct 27 '16 at 17:33
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I can't seem to load the picture myself, but it is probably used for emphasis. Similar to ALL CAPS or periods after single words like "OH. MY. GOSH." in English.

ishikun
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