What means
It fills one of 16 subcells inside a text character slot.
Picture each character cell as a 4-by-4 grid: this patch is in the lower-middle row, just left of center. A computer could combine filled and empty patches to sketch larger pictures on a text-only screen.
Microcomputers and terminals used semigraphic blocks from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, before screen graphics routinely addressed individual pixels. In 2021, a Unicode proposal mapped this exact tile from an old computer character set so its text graphics could survive file conversion and emulation.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does this show as a box?
A box means the active font or renderer cannot draw the glyph. Ghostty's project marked sixteenth-block rendering support implemented by August 2025; support can differ in other apps.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- pixel block · mosaic block · semigraphics · textmode · terminal · tile · retrocomputing · black square · solid square
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜺙\1CE991CE99, then press Alt+X. If it follows other text, select the code first.Why is a box on my screen?
fsymbols draws rare signs with its own fonts, so they show here even where your device has none. An app or website without such a font shows an empty box (□) or a question mark instead. Turn our fonts off to see each sign as your device draws it by itself: a box here means a box in your chats and documents too.
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.