What ⏚ means
It identifies the point the drawing connects electrically to Earth.
“Earth ground” names that connection. Chassis ground connects to an equipment case or frame; signal or circuit ground is the circuit’s voltage reference. The wiring and labels show whether those points are bonded together.
Where did the earth ground symbol come from?
Electrical grounding was already part of practical power systems before this character had a computer encoding. In 1900, Nikola Tesla’s patent for electrical transmission described Earth as part of the system’s electrical path; it documents the engineering context, not the first use of this exact drawing.
Unicode records ⏚ as coming through HKSCS-2001, a Hong Kong character set. That traces the glyph’s encoding route, not the origin of grounding diagrams.
How can I type the earth ground symbol?
Use Unicode hexadecimal entry in the app where you’re typing.
The keystrokes differ by application. Word and GNOME offer keyboard routes, while source code can use a Unicode escape or an HTML entity.
Technical and specific: it marks an earth connection; other ground labels may describe separate circuit points.
Do not assume every point marked “ground” is the same node.
Questions people ask
1Why does the earth ground symbol show as a box?
A box usually means the font used for the text has no drawing for ⏚ and the app found no fallback font that does. Try a font with broader technical-symbol coverage; another app may use a different font.
How to type ⏚
⏚\23DACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.