What 🬢 means
A six-cell tile for building tiny text graphics.
On 1970s home computers, programs lit mini-blocks inside character cells, then arranged them into pictures. France’s Minitel service, an online information system reached through a phone line, used similar blocks from the early 1980s. “Sextant” labels six cells by analogy with a four-cell “quadrant.”
Why can the squares look split?
Teletext allowed joined or separated mosaics.
The 1997 teletext standard shows contiguous cells touching or separated cells with thin gaps. The gaps change the outline, not which parts of the pattern are filled.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why 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.
How to type 🬢
🬢\1FB22Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.