Right-hand telephone receiver

It stands for a phone or a phone call, nothing more. The drawing is a handset, the curved part of a landline phone with the earpiece at one end and the mouthpiece at the other, lying with its ends pointing right. Even for people who have never lifted one, the shape still reads as “telephone”, the way a floppy disk still means “save”.

You are more likely to meet it in documents than in chat: a contact line such as 🕽 +44 20 7946 0000 on a CV, business card, invoice or email signature, next to ✉ for the email address. In a message it is a shorthand for “call me” or “let’s do this by phone”, but it is rarely sent that way, because the emoji 📞 is on phone keyboards and this symbol is not.

Why does it look so dated, and does the direction matter?

It comes from Wingdings 2, and “right hand” only says which way it faces. 🕽 is one of the picture characters from Microsoft’s Wingdings symbol fonts that Unicode took in as real characters in 2014, so that text made with those fonts could keep its pictures, be searched and travel between computers. Its relatives are 🕻, the same handset facing left, borrowed from the sister font Webdings, and 🕼, a handset with a sheet of paper for fax.

The two directions exist because the old symbol fonts drew the handset both ways, and Unicode simply names each by the way it faces; neither one means “incoming”, “outgoing” or “right side”. The drawing recalls the one-piece handset that Western Electric brought to American desks in 1927 and the 1949 Model 500 made famous, which is why the symbol looks like a prop from a black-and-white film.