Block sextant 13456

🬺 is a six-cell drawing tile for text graphics, with five filled blocks. On its own, it shows one block pattern; beside other character cells, it helps build a picture.

Text symbol

What 🬺 means

It turns a character space into a chunky pixel.

UK teletext, a service that broadcast information pages to television sets, used 23 mosaics from the early 1970s to draw maps and charts. Related block graphics appeared on home computers. France’s Minitel, a telephone-based information service, used the same grid from the early 1980s until 2012.

The 2019 proposal to add these tiles to Unicode, the shared character set computers use, aimed to keep old data convertible and support emulators, programs that imitate earlier machines. In 1997, Europe’s teletext standard allowed mosaic cells to touch or show narrow gaps; transmission controls chose the mode. That gap changes the display, not 🬺’s role as a drawing tile.

Don't confuse it with

▙

Quadrant Upper Left And Lower Left And Lower Right

▙ leaves the whole upper-right quarter empty; 🬺 leaves only a smaller top-right sixth.

⠷

Braille Pattern Dots-12356

Braille ⠷ fills the same five spots with small dots, not a near-solid block.

Combination ideas

Battlement-style band: solid, with regular notches along the top.

Solid block with a centred notch on top.

Block with both top outer corners cut away.

Questions people ask

Why 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.