What 🬅 means
It fills cells 2 and 3 in a six-cell grid. The sextant grid has two columns and three rows, numbered across each row; cell 2 is upper-right and cell 3 is middle-left, making a small step.
Why were sextant tiles made?
They let text screens draw blocky pictures. TRS-80 computers used characters built from six small squares called “squots” (“square dots”). A 1979 guide taught programmers to switch the cells on and off to make pictures. Teletext, a text-and-graphics service broadcast to televisions, used 23 mosaic characters too; Unicode’s historical source mapping connects this exact pattern to both repertoires.
Set sextant tiles side by side and their filled cells combine into larger shapes. This character supplies one patch of the picture, like a chunky pixel.
Questions people ask
1Why does sextant 23 show as a box in some terminals?
A missing-glyph fallback. As of 2026-09-29, terminal support for legacy block mosaics varies by emulator; unsupported displays can show a box while the text still contains this character.
More like this
10
Collections with 🬅
2
How to type or find 🬅
- Search it as
- squot · squots · mosaic · mosaic tile · mosaic graphic · semigraphics · teletext · block graphic
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🬅\1FB05Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.