What 🬇 means
They let text-only screens draw coarse pictures. Each character space held six on-off squares; neighboring tiles joined into larger images.
British teletext, a TV information service, used 2×3 mosaics on broadcast pages from the early 1970s. French Minitel, an interactive phone-line service, also used block graphics.
A 2019 proposal grouped old-computer and teletext graphics for compatibility, calling each six-cell tile a “sextant,” by analogy with four-part “quadrant” blocks.
Technical: a pixel for a larger grid, not a complete picture.
Font or renderer support may be missing; a Zed terminal showed a placeholder for this block in May 2026.
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 🬇
🬇\1FB07Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.