Overlapping Black Squares

It marks a pair of bishops tied to the same square colour. Each chess bishop stays on one colour of squares, so two such bishops share a diagonal network. The sign compresses that relationship into one note.

The sign belongs to a language-independent system of symbols for expert game commentary. Chess Informant, a Serbian chess magazine that helped spread chess expertise across the Iron Curtain, has been an important publication since the 1960s. A multilingual encyclopedia of chess endgames printed the system in a table of widely used notation in 1993.

Will people understand it outside chess?

Usually not; it is specialist chess notation. Chess players may read a precise positional clue, while other readers may see only overlapping squares. Outside chess, it has no established everyday-chat meaning as of 2026.

The three related marks keep different readings: ⮺ is a pair of bishops, ⮻ means bishops on opposite-colour squares, and ⮼ marks bishops on the same-colour squares. Using ⮼ for generic overlap drops that chess distinction.

Fonts can draw the overlap a little differently. The glyph's shape may vary, but its chess reading stays the same.