What ▒ means
Medium shade symbol use is practical: ▒ fills one fixed-width cell with dots or speckles for middle density. No single inventor is credited as of 2026-09-17; it arrived with IBM PC and terminal sets that Unicode later standardized together for graphics without bitmaps.
In ▒ ANSI art it became shadow, texture and depth, or the middle step between light and dark fills. String the shade blocks gradient together for fades, bars and retro screens, and let the family tuner idea guide you: density does the talking, not emoji mood.
Technical and retro: it reads as deliberately text-built graphics, not ordinary prose.
Medium shade safe in plain text? Mostly, but as of 2026-09-17 don't trust every font.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
5
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ▒ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
25
■Black Square
□White Square
⬛Black Large Square
⬜White Large SquareSymbol For Delete Medium Shade FormOrthogonal Crosshatch FillDiagonal Crosshatch Fill🮌Left Half Medium Shade🮍Right Half Medium Shade🮎Upper Half Medium Shade🮑Upper Half Block And Lower Half Inverse Medium Shade🮒Upper Half Inverse Medium Shade And Lower Half Block🮖Inverse Checker Board Fill🮜Upper Left Triangular Medium Shade🮝Upper Right Triangular Medium Shade🮞Lower Right Triangular Medium Shade🮟Lower Left Triangular Medium Shade
▐Right Half Block
░Light Shade
▓Dark Shade
␀Symbol For Null
␁Symbol For Start Of Heading
␂Symbol For Start Of Text
␃Symbol For End Of Text
␄Symbol For End Of TransmissionCollections with ▒
12
How to type or find ▒
- Also called
- shaded block · dithered block
- Search it as
- ansi shade · cp437 shade · text shading · block fill
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.