What 🡐 means
It points left: back, previous, or "this way".
"Sans-serif" is a typography word for letters without the small finishing strokes at their ends. Here it describes the arrow's style: an even, clean shaft and a plain head, the kind you see on a Back button, a "previous page" link or a slide pointing at something on its left.
Its origin is the Wingdings family of symbol fonts that came with Windows from 1992, which grew out of the Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars designs. In those fonts an arrow was really just a letter key drawn as a picture, so it turned into a random letter whenever the font changed. Unicode 7.0 gave such arrows code points of their own, so 🡐 stays an arrow in any font that includes it.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
4
Related characters
4
Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- Before Unicode, a Wingdings arrow sent to someone without that font often arrived as a stray letter, which is why symbols like this were finally encoded as real characters.
Questions people ask
2Why do I see a box instead of the arrow?
Your font lacks it. The character is still there; many common fonts skip this block, so a symbol font or another device will show the arrow.
Is 🡐 the same as ?
No. They look alike but are different characters, so searching for one won't find the other. Use unless you want this specific style.
More like this
12
How to type or find 🡐
- Search it as
- left arrow · sans-serif arrow · back arrow · U+1F850 · Wingdings arrow · previous arrow
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🡐\1F850Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.