Lower Left Triangle

A hollow right triangle with its square corner at the bottom left. The upright side runs up the left, the base runs along the bottom, and the slanted side joins them from top left to bottom right. It is drawn as an outline; the solid version is a separate character, ◣. Unicode files it as a mathematical symbol and gives it three siblings with the square corner in the other positions: ◸ (top left), ◹ (top right) and ◿ (bottom right). In HTML it has its own entity name, ◺, which is where the "lltri" shorthand you may see comes from.

You meet it in two kinds of place: in maths and school notes, where a right triangle is wanted inside a line of text, and as decoration in text art and plain-text layouts. In neither case does it carry a meaning of its own; it is a shape you draw with.

Whether you see it at all depends on the font. Most computers have a font that includes it, but an app or a decorative web font without it may show an empty box instead. That usually means the font is missing the shape, not that the message broke.

What does it mean when someone sends ◺?

Nothing on its own; read the picture or layout it belongs to. Unlike ▲ or ▶, which people often read as "up" and "play", ◺ has no everyday reading. Alone it is usually decoration, a test of whether your phone shows it, or a mis-tap from a symbol keyboard. In a row of shapes it is a building block: depending on the font, ◺◿ side by side make a flat-bottomed V, ◸◹ an inverted one, and the four together frame a word. In a maths conversation it just means "right triangle". If you were hoping for an arrow, this is the wrong character; its slanted edge points nowhere in particular.