What 🨧 means
Read it as a special chess-piece sign with defined rules.
The design takes the ordinary black bishop, , and turns it through 180. In a chess diagram, black identifies the piece’s side. The turn lets the diagram distinguish a different kind of piece: consult the accompanying key or rules for its movement. You cannot assume it moves diagonally like an ordinary bishop.
Why turn the symbol upside down?
Printers could create extra piece signs by turning existing type.
With cast-metal printing type, rotating a chess symbol provided another sign without making a new design. The turned shape is a notation convention, rather than an instruction to balance a physical chess piece on its head.
The bishop itself has a longer history: its predecessor was the alfil, or elephant, in shatranj, an older form of chess. That ancestry explains the piece’s history, not the meaning of this upside-down sign.
Part of the collection
Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Why do I see a box instead of the symbol?
Your font may not contain this character. Displaying it requires a font that supports the extended chess symbols; support for the ordinary bishop does not guarantee support for 🨧.
More like this
10
How to type or find 🨧
- Search it as
- upside down bishop · black bishop · inverted bishop · fairy chess bishop
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🨧\1FA27Why is 🨧 a box on my screen?
fsymbols draws rare signs with its own fonts, so they show here even where your device has none. An app or website without such a font shows an empty box (□) or a question mark instead. Turn our fonts off to see each sign as your device draws it by itself: a box here means a box in your chats and documents too.
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.