North West Black Arrow

Use ⬉ or ⬉ as a numeric character reference.

The first form is hexadecimal (base 16); the second is decimal (base 10). A browser displays ⬉ from either form in an HTML page.

By itself, the arrow gives a direction, not an instruction. Labels or lines in the surrounding note show what is moving and where it is headed.

Why did Unicode correct the drawing?

An early pair of sample drawings pointed opposite to their names.

In a 2004 erratum, Unicode noted that the sample glyphs for ⬈ and ⬉ pointed in opposite diagonal directions. Its technical committee voted to swap the representative glyphs; the names stayed unchanged.

In 2001, North Korea proposed this diagonal-arrow group as compatibility characters from KPS 9566-97, its character-encoding standard. Compatibility characters preserve symbols from an existing system; the arrows entered Unicode in 2003. In 2014, Unicode harmonized the black-arrow drawings with arrow designs from Wingdings and Webdings, two fonts built around symbols. Separately, an arrow in a 1737 French engineering book by Bernard Forest de Bélidor marks water flow and a waterwheel’s rotation. That is an early arrow example, not the origin of ⬉’s exact design.