What means
It fills five cells in a two-column, four-row grid. The ending digits identify its pattern. Kaypro computers used block graphics like these to draw pictures on screens built for text.
In 1984, programmer Doug Mahugh bought a Kaypro II and later wrote SCS-Draw, a paint program for its graphics mode. A 2021 proposal to add these characters to Unicode, the shared text standard, explains the name: its authors coined descriptive labels because computer makers often supplied charts without naming each glyph.
Technical and utilitarian: a patterned tile for text graphics.
Ratatui, a Rust library for terminal interfaces, documents octants for charts in 2026; unsupported terminals may show instead.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Questions 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.
More like this
10
How to type or find
- Search it as
- terminal graphics · text graphics · block graphics · octant · semigraphics
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜵫\1CD6BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.