What ⍆ means
⍆ is an APL symbol; its job depends on the language. APL is a compact-symbol programming family for data processing. Kenneth Iverson began this notation work in 1957; his 1962 book presented Iverson Notation. IBM's first APL Selectric type ball, a replaceable character-printing part, was designed in 1964. These dates trace APL's development, not ⍆'s first appearance.
Different APL systems can assign different jobs to one glyph, so ⍆ has no universal operation. Uiua, a language for arrays, uses sort ⍆ to sort arrays; its 2025 release history records that use.
Don't confuse it with
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Questions people ask
1Why does ⍆ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
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How to type or find ⍆
- Search it as
- APL symbol · Uiua ⍆
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⍆\2346Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.