What 🬦 means
It lights cells 4 and 6 in a two-column, three-row text cell. The six mini-blocks are sometimes called sixels; neighboring patterns fit together to make block graphics. “Sextant” means a six-part block, by analogy with older four-part quadrant blocks.
Why did teletext use six-cell mosaics?
They let text rows draw low-resolution pictures. The format appears in early-1970s teletext and in home-computer character sets from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. The UK broadcast specification published in September 1976 describes tiles either joined or separated by narrow gaps.
Unicode’s compatibility mapping preserves these legacy character sets for conversion and emulation. In 2023, a programming example used the same grid to turn an image into terminal text, extending the original picture-making trick.
Don't confuse it with
4Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
1Why does Block Sextant-46 look different in different fonts?
That is normal: this is a text glyph, so each font supplies its drawing. Unicode’s chart image is only an example; fonts can give the same character different proportions without changing its identity.
How to type 🬦
🬦\1FB26Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.