What means
A small alien crab, caught mid-step. A game sprite is a fixed screen picture a program can show as a character.
This Sharp MZ-700 game sprite came from the computer’s European alternate character table, a second set of screen symbols. A read-only memory chip held 512 patterns, each an 8×8 dot grid, for the text screen. In 2021, a Unicode proposal mapped it to entry 0x31 to preserve that old set in modern text.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does the crab symbol show as a box?
Your app’s active font or renderer lacks a glyph for it. A font that includes this character can display it; the text itself still carries the same symbol.
How to type
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1CC51, then Alt+X to get .
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “alien crab stepping left”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1cc51, then Enter or Space.
HTML
𜱑CSS
\1CC51Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
𜱑
HTML hex
𜱑
CSS content
content: "\1CC51";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9C%B1%91
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.