What 🬁 means
It marks one of six cells in a 2×3 text tile.
A sextant is a six-part grid, like chunky pixels in one character cell; tiles join into drawings.
Why were these tiles used?
They let text screens draw simple pictures.
Teletext, a British TV page service, used 2×3 mosaics in the early 1970s. Older computers and France’s Minitel home information service used similar graphics. In 2019, a Unicode proposal preserved them for compatibility and text-mode drawing.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does 🬁 show as a box?
Your font or app may lack its glyph. In terminal data checked as of 2026-09-26, block-mosaic support differed by emulator; some terminals draw these shapes themselves.
How to type 🬁
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1FB01, 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 sextant-2”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1fb01, then Enter or Space.
HTML
🬁CSS
\1FB01Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🬁
HTML hex
🬁
CSS content
content: "\1FB01";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%AC%81
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.