What ⌬ means
It stands for benzene in chemical notation. The classic Kekulé drawing—named for chemist August Kekulé—puts a carbon at each corner; lines mark neighboring bonds.
In 1865, Kekulé used a bare chemical hexagon to mark six equivalent hydrogen atoms in benzene; it did not yet show the carbons. In 1866, Adolf Claus gave the sign its familiar reading as a ring of six carbons.
Technical and academic; it fits chemistry notes and structural diagrams.
Font support can alter or omit the visible glyph; the sent character remains ⌬.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions 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.
How to type ⌬
⌬\232CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.