What ☐ means
It marks a task or option that remains open and pending. In everyday texting and personal notes, placing ☐ before an item turns it into a to-do list item waiting for completion. Beside survey questions or settings, it indicates an available option that has not been selected.
Unicode officially names this glyph “ballot box,” recalling the voting squares on paper election ballots and the containers used in elections since the seventeenth century. In modern digital text, it is widely used as an empty checklist box beside items that need attention.
Neutral and practical across task lists, work notes, forms, and ballots.
Never interpret an empty box as completed; it explicitly means undone or unselected.
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA pending task that has not been completed yet.
Don't confuse it with
5
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
4Questions people ask
2Why is a checklist box called a ballot box in Unicode?
Unicode gave U2610 the formal name BALLOT BOX after the printed marking squares on paper voting ballots.
Is ☐ an emoji?
No. It is a standard monochrome text character, rendered as plain text by your system font.
More like this
33
☑️Check Box With Check
☒Ballot Box With X
🗹Ballot Box With Bold Check
✅Check Mark Button
□White Square
🗳️Ballot Box With Ballot
✓Check Mark
📋Clipboard
▢White Square With Rounded Corners
▭White Rectangle
▯White Vertical Rectangle
◫White Square With Vertical Bisecting Line
❏Lower Right Drop-Shadowed White Square
❐Upper Right Drop-Shadowed White Square
❑Lower Right Shadowed White Square
❒Upper Right Shadowed White Square
⬚Dotted Square
⮽Ballot Box With Light X
🗵Ballot Box With Script X
🗷Ballot Box With Bold Script X
🞎Light White Square
🞏Medium White Square
🞐Bold White Square
🞑Heavy White Square
🞒Very Heavy White Square
🞓Extremely Heavy White Square
⯐Square Position Indicator꠷North Indic Placeholder Mark
☍Opposition
☏White Telephone
¦Broken Bar
°Degree Sign
■Black SquareCollections with ☐
14
✅Well Done & Good Job Emoji
👍Yes, No & OK Emoji
💼Work & Office Emoji
📚School & Study Emoji
🧑💻Coding Emoji
🗳️Voting & Election Emoji
⌨️Terminal Symbols & Emoji
■Square & Rectangle Symbols
📌Discord Symbols
📸Instagram Symbols
👍Facebook Symbols & Emoji
🎵TikTok Symbols & Emoji
💼LinkedIn Symbols & Emoji
⛏️Minecraft SymbolsHow to type or find ☐
- Also called
- empty checkbox · unchecked box · tick box
- Search it as
- checkbox · empty box · unchecked · checklist · todo · to-do list · voting square · blank square
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
☐\2610Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.