What means
It fills four of its eight cells. Number the two-column, four-row grid from left to right, top to bottom: 2, 4, 5 and 8 are filled. An octant is this eight-cell mosaic.
The Kaypro II, an early home computer running CP/M, an operating system, stored this as character slot E5. Programs combined such blocks like pixels on text screens. Unicode retained the form for converting old character data and emulating those computers.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does appear as an empty box?
The font or terminal may lack its drawing. As of 2026-09-28, very few fonts include outlines for these symbols; some terminals draw them themselves. Without either, it may appear as a missing-glyph box.
How to type
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1CD8A, then Alt+X to get .
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “block octant-2458”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1cd8a, then Enter or Space.
HTML
𜶊CSS
\1CD8AHTML
Use the hexadecimal character reference `𜶊` in markup; the browser resolves it to this character.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
𜶊
HTML hex
𜶊
CSS content
content: "\1CD8A";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9C%B6%8A
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.