››

𜱎

alien squid open tentacles

Alien Squid with Open Tentacles

𜱎 is the Aquarius alien squid, a retro game sprite—a small picture used as a game character—with its tentacles open. The Mattel Aquarius relied on built-in character pictures for game screens because it could not draw custom images on its own.

Text symbol

What 𜱎 means

The preset characters supplied the graphics the computer could not draw itself.

The Mattel Aquarius launched in 1983 without a way to draw custom images. After consulting game programmers, Mattel Electronics designers Joe Ferreira, Monique Lujan-Bakerink, and Peggi Decarli made a fixed character set of figures, movement poses, and backgrounds for game screens; 𜱎 is one of those ready-drawn Aquarius sprites.

A Unicode proposal in 2021 identified this exact graphic in the Aquarius set. Unicode added it in 2024 so modern text files and emulators could preserve the original character instead of substituting a lookalike.

Part of the collection

🬀

Retro Computer & Teletext Symbols

Questions people ask

Why does 𜱎 show as a box on my screen?

Your font probably lacks its drawing. BabelStone Pseudographica version 16.0.0, released in 2024, includes 𜱎; using a font with this character lets its shape appear.

How to type or find 𜱎

Search it as: aquarius sprite · mattel aquarius · retro game sprite · old computer graphic · game creature · text mode character
Shows up in: Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

Windows (Word)

⎇Alt+XType 1CC4E, then AltX 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 squid open tentacles”.

Linux

⎈Ctrl+⇧Shift+UType 1cc4e, then Enter or Space.

HTML

𜱎

CSS

\1CC4E

HTML

HTML code for 𜱎: write 𜱎 in the markup. This hexadecimal character reference resolves to the exact character.

JavaScript

Use \u{1CC4E} inside a JavaScript string or template literal. The braces let one escape represent the character instead of spelling it as a pair.

Codes and encoding1 code points

HTML decimal

𜱎

HTML hex

𜱎

CSS content

content: "\1CC4E";

Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.

URL encoded

%F0%9C%B1%8E

On screen

Code points

JS .length

UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

Legacy computing935 symbols

𜰀𜰁𜰂𜰃𜰄𜰅𜰆𜰇𜰈𜰉𜰊𜰋