Pointing Hand Symbols

The pointing hand symbol ☞ is a small hand with the index finger extended, and it is far older than emoji. Scribes drew it in the margins of manuscripts to mark a passage worth remembering; the usual name for it is manicule, from the Latin for "little hand", and printers later called it a fist, an index or a printer's hand. That is why the Unicode names say index: ☞ is WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX, ☜ the left one, ☝ up and ☟ down. The filled versions are ☛ BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX and ☚ for the left.

All six live in the Miscellaneous Symbols block and have been in Unicode since version 1.1 in 1993, so they display on practically every device, in the colour and weight of the surrounding text. ☝ is the odd one out: it later became an emoji too, so ☝️ with the emoji selector shows the coloured picture and plain ☝ the text glyph. That text-like behaviour is what makes ☞ and ☜ so popular in usernames, bios and forum signatures: ☞ YOUR TEXT ☜ frames a word without a splash of colour, and ☟ points at a link below.

Pointing finger emoji: 👉 👈 👆 👇 ☝️ 🫵 and what they mean

The four backhand fingers 👉 👈 👆 👇 arrived with Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and are the pointing finger emoji most people reach for. 👉 says "look at this" or "this one", 👇 points at the next message, a comment section or a link under a post, 👆 refers back to something above, and 👈 points at whatever stands to its left. In a caption, "link in bio 👇" and "swipe 👉" are so common that the finger reads like punctuation.

☝️ index pointing up is a raised finger, not a backhand one: it means "wait", "one thing", "listen" or a teacher making a point, and it often starts a reply that corrects someone. 🫵 index pointing at the viewer came much later, in Unicode 14.0 (2021), and simply means "you": "🫵 did this", "this one's for 🫵", or the Uncle Sam poster look in memes. 🖕 middle finger needs no translation; it came in with Unicode 7.0 in 2014 and some apps still soften or hide it.

The pair 👉👈 is its own expression. Two fingers touching, usually with 🥺, is the shy, nervous pose of someone asking for something small: "can I have a hug 👉👈". It became a meme around 2019 and is still read instantly. Every one of these hands takes the five skin tone modifiers, so 👉🏻 and 👉🏿 are the same emoji with a tone added.

The Wingdings hands, the three-part hand and other old computer pointers

A second family of pointing hand symbols came from the Wingdings font. When Unicode 7.0 added its pictographs in 2014 it took the backhand pointers 🖝 🖜 🖢 🖣, the sideways hands 🖙 🖘 🖞 🖟 and their filled versions 🖛 🖚 🖠 🖡, and a single white down-pointing left hand 🖗. In the Wingdings font itself the capital letters E, F, G and H print as the white hands left, right, up and down, which is why a stray "F" in Wingdings turns into a pointing finger. These characters are rarer in fonts than ☞, so they may show as an empty box on some phones; check before you put them in a bio.

Unicode 13.0 (2020) added three odd fragments, 🯁 🯂 🯃, the left, middle and right thirds of a white right-pointing hand. They come from an old home-computer character set in which the hand was wider than one character cell and had to be drawn in three pieces; typed side by side, 🯁🯂🯃 rebuild the whole hand. The same block of legacy computing symbols holds 🮰, the arrowhead-shaped mouse pointer, and Unicode 16.0 (2024) added two more cursor shapes, 𜲆 and 𜲇, which few fonts cover yet.

The finger-post arrows 🠴 🠵 🠶 🠷 are the signpost shape, a board with a pointed end, in four directions. They sit in the Supplemental Arrows-C block, also from Unicode 7.0, and are a handy middle ground between a hand and an arrow.

Arrowheads people use as pointing hands

In lists, menus and bios the filled arrowheads do the same job as ☞. ➤ black rightwards arrowhead and the shaded ➢ and ➣ are the usual bullet pointers; ➜ ➔ ➧ ➨ are the heavier dingbat arrows, and ➝ ➞ ➟ ➠ are triangle-headed in four weights. All of them come from the Dingbats block and only point right, so for a left pointer you fall back to ☜ or an arrow from the Arrow Symbols collection.

► and ◄ are literally named pointers in Unicode, and the smaller ▸ ▹ make tidy sub-bullets. ⮞ and 🢒 are bare triangular heads with no shaft, and the angle marks › » ❯ are quotation marks by origin but read as "next" or "see" in breadcrumbs and menus. If you want every arrow rather than just the pointers, the Arrow Symbols collection has the full set, and the Hand Emoji collection has every other hand gesture.

How to type a pointing hand symbol in Word, Windows and Mac

In Word, type the code 261E and press Alt+X to turn it into ☞; 261C gives ☜, 261D ☝, 261F ☟, 261B ☛ and 261A ☚. The same trick works in most Office apps. Insert → Symbol also lists them under the Segoe UI Symbol font, and the Wingdings font shows the hands at the letters E to H.

On Windows with a numeric keypad, hold Alt and type 9758 for ☞, 9756 for ☜, 9757 for ☝ and 9759 for ☟. On a Mac, Control+Command+Space opens the character viewer; search for "index" to find the text hands or "pointing" for the emoji. On a phone the emoji keyboard has 👉 👈 👆 👇 ☝️ 🫵 under the people or hand section, while the text hands ☞ ☜ are not on the keyboard at all, so the simplest way is to copy them from this page.