🟥 Red Square — fsymbols

What 🟥 means

Only when the message around it says so. The square holds no picture, so it takes its meaning from its colour and its neighbours. Red tends to suggest stop, a problem or "look here", so in a row with yellow and green squares people read it like a traffic light: red is the worst, failed or blocked item, green the one that is fine. At the start of a line it is a coloured bullet flagging an item. Beside a footballer's name it is a red card. In a grid of many squares it is just a colour.

Unicode gives 🟥 no warning meaning of its own. If you want a warning nobody can miss, or says it with a picture; a lone 🟥 only shows a colour, so read the words that come with it before deciding what the sender meant.

Plain and functional. It has no mood of its own; the colour red and the surrounding words decide how it lands.

In a shared status list, a decorative 🟥 next to someone's task can read as "failed" or "blocked".

Part of collections

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Square & Rectangle Symbols

🔴

Red Emoji

What it means when someone sends it to you

4 readings

Traffic-light scale: red is the worst, failed or stopped option.

Don't confuse it with

3

🔴

Red Circle

The red circle is round; 🟥 has straight sides and corners.

🟧

Orange Square

The orange square is lighter and yellower; on some designs and small screens the two look close.

🟫

Brown Square

The brown square is darker and duller, but some designs draw a deep red, so the tiles can look close on small screens.

Related characters

2

🟨

Yellow Square

Football's other card: yellow is a caution, red sends the player off. Two yellows in one match add up to a red.

🟩

Green Square

The opposite end of red-amber-green status scales: red means stop or a problem, green means fine or done.

Combination ideas

4

A red card in a football match.

Two yellow cards make a red: sent off.

A scale from bad to good, like a traffic light.

Red team against blue team.

Worth knowing

🟥 arrived in 2019 together with six other coloured squares and five coloured circles; the red and blue circles already existed before that.
Kazimir Malevich painted a famous abstract canvas in 1915 whose short title is "Red Square": a slightly tilted red square on a white ground.

Questions people ask

2

Is 🟥 the Red Square in Moscow?

No. It is a geometric shape named for its colour; English uses "square" for both a shape and a town square, hence the clash. There is no emoji for the Moscow landmark.

Why does it look different on my friend's phone?

Each platform draws its own version: some flat, some with rounded corners or a light gradient. It is the same character, so the meaning still comes from context.