What ▶️ means
▶️ is the play button emoji, filed under Symbols in the av-symbol subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 0.6 (2010) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 3.2 (2002). The characters therefore predate their emoji presentation by 8 years.
How it is encoded
▶️ is a sequence of 2 code points (U+25B6 U+FE0F), joined so that they render as one glyph. Software that counts characters will report 2, not 1 — the usual source of broken emoji handling.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Practical, not emotional — an instruction more than a feeling.
Sent cold after silence, a bare ▶️ can land as an impatient “well?”
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Worth knowing
- The triangle comes from tape machines, where it showed which way the tape moved. Sony's TC-100 cassette recorder used it in 1968; a Philips deck from 1963 marked play with an upward arrow.
Questions people ask
1Why does the play button emoji show as a black triangle?
Not broken — just text style. ▶️ carries a hidden selector asking for emoji style; plain-text views or older fonts ignore it and show the bare triangle.
How to type ▶️
:arrow_forward:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.▶️Codes and encoding2 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.