What means
It is a six-cell tile for separated block graphics. Here, “sextant” means a rectangle split into two columns and three rows; “156” identifies its filled-cell pattern. Its gaps are the key visual distinction: fonts vary, and if the spaces disappear it can look like the contiguous form.
Teletext began in the UK in the early 1970s; the September 1976 Broadcast Teletext Specification defined graphics built from six cells and a separated mode with background-colored gaps around them. Teletext used these tiles for simple pictures on information pages. A 2021 Unicode proposal explained that encoding the separated forms as distinct characters would preserve existing Teletext data and help emulators.
Part of the collection
Questions people ask
1Why does show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
10
How to type or find
- Search it as
- teletext · mosaic · semigraphics · videotex · ceefax · terminal · retrocomputing
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜺁\1CE81Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.