What means
It fills six of eight blocks in a text-cell mosaic. The digits name the filled parts of a 2 4 grid. In semigraphics—pictures made from text cells—tiles like this act as pseudo-pixels and join into larger shapes.
Text mosaics appeared in teletext, whose standard was developed in the early 1970s, and on microcomputers from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. The technique used simple text cells to draw pictures.
In Kaypro's 1984 graphics system, reverse video flipped light and dark; a Unicode source table maps this exact pattern to entry 89 (base 16) in its reverse graphics set. The 2021 proposal grouped octants with terminal graphics to preserve legacy characters and support emulators, conversions, and text-mode apps.
Why does block octant 145678 show as a box?
The active font may not contain this glyph. An app can show a replacement box when its font cannot draw a character; the stored character can still be intact.
As of 2026, terminal emulators differ in their coverage of this supplementary block. Even with a supporting font, adjacent terminal cells need to align for the mosaic to connect; proportional spacing can leave gaps.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
1Why does show as a box on some devices?
It is recent: Unicode added it in version 16.0 (2024), and phones and computers whose fonts are older than that have nothing to draw it with. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- semigraphics · terminal · mosaic · pseudographics · pseudo-pixel · textmode
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜷢\1CDE2𜷢 as a hexadecimal character reference.\u{1CDE2}.\U0001CDE2.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.