What ⛹️ means
It started as a Japanese digital-TV map symbol. ARIB, the Japanese broadcasting standards body, defined symbols for on-screen maps and guides, and this one marked a track-and-field ground or gymnasium. A 2007 proposal carried that set toward Unicode, alongside ski-field and ice-rink signs. Emoji artwork draws it as a basketball player mid-dribble, which is how it reads in messages.
Every form of this symbol
18Click a version to select and copy it.
Don't confuse it with
1Worth knowing
- The characters behind ⛹️ existed in Unicode 5 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 5.2 in 2009, emoji presentation in 2014.
- ⛹️ is not one character. It is 2 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
Questions people ask
1Does ⛹️ default to a man or a woman?
Neither. The plain figure is gender-neutral; choose ⛹️♂️ or ⛹️♀️, plus a skin tone, to show a specific player.
How to type ⛹️
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “person bouncing ball”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “person bouncing ball”.
Chat apps
:person_with_ball:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
⛹️Codes and encoding2 code points
HTML decimal
⛹️
HTML hex
⛹️
CSS content
content: "\26F9\FE0F";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E2%9B%B9%EF%B8%8F
1
On screen
2
Code points
2
JS .length
6
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.