What ⭜ means
A voice that keeps rising in pitch. Dialectologists, the linguists who travel to villages and write down how people really speak, need marks for melody as well as sounds. In Lithuanian dialect notation, ⭜ is written after a word or phrase to say its pitch goes up and stays climbing.
Read the shape literally: the horizontal tail is the line of speech, the head tilts up and away from it. It belongs to a small set of contour arrows encoded together, with separate marks for falls and for rises that turn down again. It does not mean north, up-right or "increase" in everyday text, though nothing stops someone borrowing it as a decorative arrow.
Why did it get into Unicode?
Scholars needed to type marks they had long drawn by hand. The proposal that brought ⭜ into Unicode showed Lithuanian intonation notation from printed works dated 1930 and 2001, evidence of a real written tradition. Encoding it lets dictionaries, dialect atlases and papers be digitised without pasting in images.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
2Why do I see a box instead of ⭜?
Your font lacks it. Only fonts with wide symbol coverage include this arrow; the character itself is intact and will show correctly where a suitable font is installed.
Can I use ⭜ as a normal arrow?
You can, nothing forbids it. But for direction or growth, is understood everywhere and displays on almost every device.
More like this
13
How to type or find ⭜
- Search it as
- slanted north arrow · horizontal tail arrow · intonation arrow · rising pitch mark · Lithuanian intonation · U+2B5C
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⭜\2B5CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.