What 🬩 means
They let text cells act like six coarse pixels.
Teletext developed in the early 1970s; Britain’s original broadcast specification included this 2×3 mosaic set in 1976. Early home computers used related semigraphics too. Tiles sat side by side in a text grid to sketch larger pictures. Unicode later grouped the patterns with other legacy computer graphics for file exchange and emulator support.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does 🬩 show as a box?
An outlined box means this font or renderer lacks the glyph. A Zed terminal report in May 2026 showed this range falling back in one setup; some other terminals rendered the sextants directly.
How to type 🬩
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1FB29, 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-346”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1fb29, then Enter or Space.
HTML
🬩CSS
\1FB29Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🬩
HTML hex
🬩
CSS content
content: "\1FB29";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%AC%A9
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.