Spiral & Swirl Symbols

The one true spiral emoji is 🌀, named Cyclone in Unicode. It was drawn as a weather symbol on Japanese phones, where it marked a typhoon, and it still sits in the weather section of every emoji keyboard. In chats it means dizziness, confusion, hypnosis or something spinning out of control, and the phrase spiraling on Twitter and TikTok usually comes with 🌀 attached. 💫 Dizzy, a swirl with a star, and 😵‍💫 Face with Spiral Eyes cover the same feeling from the inside: head spinning, overwhelmed, knocked for a loop. 🌪️ Tornado is the violent version, used for chaos and for storms.

There is no plain text spiral in the common symbol blocks, so the spirals people copy for bios and usernames are borrowed from other writing systems. ꩜ is the Cham punctuation spiral, a mark from the Cham script of Vietnam and Cambodia; 𖦹 is a letter of the Bamum script from Cameroon; ๛ is khomut, the Thai mark that closes a chapter or a document; and ֎ ֍ are the Armenian eternity signs, an eight-armed swirl that decorates Armenian churches and gravestones. They look great in a profile, but older phones and some fonts show them as empty boxes, so check them on a second device before you commit a username to them.

Spirals have been drawn for a very long time. The triple spiral carved at Newgrange in Ireland is about five thousand years old, the Māori koru is the unfurling frond of a silver fern and stands for new life and growth, and the spiral is one of the oldest motifs in Celtic metalwork. Modern readers add their own layers: a spiral can mean a journey inward, cycles and return, or, from cartoons, hypnosis and dizziness. In Christian art the spiral is not a standard symbol; where it appears, it usually comes from older local ornament.

Loops: ➰ ➿ and the infinity sign

➰ Curly Loop and ➿ Double Curly Loop came to Unicode with the first big emoji batch in 2010 from Japanese carriers. ➿ was the free dial mark that NTT DoCoMo printed next to toll-free numbers, which is why some keyboards still describe it as a telephone symbol; outside Japan it reads simply as a double loop, a scribble or on repeat. ➰ is a single flourish and works as a decorative squiggle, a ribbon or a looping thought.

The ∞ infinity sign is the loop everyone knows; the emoji form ♾️ draws it in colour on a square. ↫ ↬ are arrows that pass through a loop on their way, and in the arrow blocks they are the closest thing to a loop arrow in text. For music apps, the loop symbol is 🔁 Repeat or 🔂 Repeat Single, and ♻️ is the three-arrow Möbius loop of recycling.

Tildes, wave dashes and wavy lines

The small wave at the top left of a US keyboard is ~ the tilde (Shift + the backtick key). In Spanish and Portuguese it sits on letters (ñ, ã), in maths ∼ means is similar to or is distributed as, ≈ means approximately equal and ≋ is the triple tilde used for even looser equivalence. ⁓ the swung dash is what dictionaries print in place of the headword, and ˜ is a spacing tilde meant for accents.

Japanese writing has its own wave: 〜 the wave dash marks ranges (10時〜12時) and stretches a sound in casual text (すごい〜), and its fullwidth twin ～ does the same job in Windows fonts. The two have caused decades of broken text: Windows mapped the Shift JIS wave dash to ～ while Mac and Unix mapped it to 〜, so files converted between them often show the wrong character or a question mark. In chat, a trailing 〜 or ~ softens a sentence or stretches it into a sing-song okay~.

For longer squiggles there is 〰️ Wavy Dash (an emoji on most phones), ∿ the sine wave from electrical notation, and the Chinese typesetting marks ﹋ ﹌ ﹏ that put a wavy line over or under text; ﹏﹏﹏ repeated makes a neat divider. ⌇ ︴ ⸾ are vertical squiggles for the rare moment you need one, and ᨒ, a Buginese letter from Indonesia, is used in aesthetic bios as a little wave or mountain. Among emoji, 🌊 Water Wave is the Hokusai-style crest, 🫧 Bubbles (added in 2021) stands for baths, fizz and clean, ♨️ Hot Springs is three wavy lines of steam and 🌬️ Wind Face blows a curling gust.

Rotation arrows: refresh, loading and undo

Circling arrows describe motion. ↻ ⟳ turn clockwise and read as refresh, reload or loading; ↺ ⟲ turn anticlockwise and read as undo, reset or rotate back. Each comes in several weights: open circle ↺ ↻, gapped circle ⟲ ⟳, closed circle ⥀ ⥁ and triangle-headed ⭯ ⭮, so you can match the font you are pasting into. The half turns ↶ ↷ and the arcs ⤹ ⤸ ⤿ ⤾ are the rotate-left and rotate-right icons of image editors.

The emoji versions are 🔄 Counterclockwise Arrows Button and 🔃 Clockwise Vertical Arrows; apps show them in a coloured square and chats use them for sync, refresh, swapping or trying again. 🗘 and ⮔ are the plain-text refresh icons from the Microsoft symbol fonts and the arrow supplements. Writing ↻ loading… in a status message is a quick way to show a spinner where no real one exists.

How to type spiral and wave symbols

On a phone, open the emoji keyboard and search cyclone, dizzy, loop, wavy or repeat; the text spirals ꩜ 𖦹 ๛ are not on any keyboard, so copy them from this page. On a Mac, press Ctrl+Cmd+Space and search tilde, wave or arrow in the Character Viewer.

In Microsoft Word, type the hex code and press Alt+X: 2248 gives ≈, 223C ∼, 3030 〰, 301C 〜, 2053 ⁓, 21BB ↻, 21BA ↺, 27F3 ⟳ and 27B0 ➰. In HTML, ≈ is ≈, ∼ is ∼ and ∞ is ∞. On Discord and Slack the shortcodes are :cyclone: 🌀, :dizzy: 💫, :curly_loop: ➰, :loop: ➿, :wavy_dash: 〰️ and :arrows_counterclockwise: 🔄.