What 🗲 means
It means lightning, electricity, or a sudden burst of energy.
In a message, 🗲 may mark literal lightning, electricity, or a sharp visual accent; nearby words set the reading.
It is a font-drawn text symbol, so its shape follows the active font.
It started as a Webdings font glyph
Webdings is a symbol font: it draws pictures where ordinary keys would otherwise produce text. Microsoft designed it in 1997 for web designers who wanted small graphics without separate image files.
By 2003, a Word discussion documented the bolt appearing when users pressed Shift+~ with Webdings selected; without that font, those keys produced a tilde. Unicode working material from 2012 mapped the Webdings bolt to 🗲 and noted that they face different directions.
Typographic bolt: the active font draws it, so its shape can vary.
For the familiar high-voltage mark, ⚡ is the clearer choice.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
2Is 🗲 an emoji?
No. It is a text symbol drawn by the active font, rather than the familiar emoji artwork associated with ⚡.
Why does Webdings show a tilde?
With Webdings active, Shift+~ uses the tilde character's font slot to draw a bolt. Without that font, the underlying character appears as ~.
How to type 🗲
🗲\1F5F2Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.