Right Half Running Man

Half of a two-cell runner drawn for Apple II text screens. In text mode, the Apple II drew its screen on a grid of character cells, each the size of one letter. A picture wider than a letter had to be split across two cells, so the running man got a left half (🮲) and a right half (🮳). Unicode kept that split when it encoded the pair, which is why the official name calls this a half. On its own it shows only part of the body; with 🮲 in front of it, it is a man running to the right.

The figure belongs to MouseText, a set of 32 little pictures Apple built into the Apple IIc in 1984 so that mouse-driven programs could draw arrows, check marks, scroll bars and window frames on a plain text screen. The pictures took the places where the machine would otherwise show inverse-video capital letters. In the earliest IIc the slots for F and G held the two halves of the running man; later versions of the set replaced them with other symbols, and Apple's own mouse technical notes of January 1989 warned programmers not to rely on the runner. Unicode added both halves in 2020, together with hundreds of other graphics from 1970s and 80s computers, so that text from those machines can be carried over into modern text.

Will anyone see it if I send it?

Not always: many phone and web fonts show a box instead. The character lives in a block that many system fonts skip, so as of 2026 whether it appears depends on the device and its fonts. Where it does show, it is usually a single-colour text shape in the style of the surrounding words.

If someone sends you 🮳 or 🮲🮳, typical explanations are retro-computing talk, an emulator or terminal screen pasted as text, or a friend testing which odd characters their phone can display. It carries no established hidden meaning; it just means a running figure, or half of one. For a runner that shows up in almost any chat, 🏃 is the widely supported emoji.