What means
A two-cell tile for text-mode pictures.
Octants use two columns and four rows; cells 2 and 3 are filled. Neighboring tiles can form maps, charts or other low-resolution shapes.
From the 1970s, home computers and teletext used semigraphics—block mosaics—to draw maps and simple pictures in text grids. A 2021 proposal placed octants beside older quadrant and sextant blocks to preserve legacy character data and support terminal apps.
Why does this octant show as a box?
Some fonts and terminals cannot draw it.
As of 2026, terminal support is uneven: some emulators draw octants directly; others rely on a font that may lack the glyph.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions 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
𜴁\1CD01Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.