What 🙓 means
A leaf-shaped ornament for text — it decorates rather than says anything. Printers call them fleurons: leaf-and-flower ornaments for dressing up pages, marking divisions or filling gaps. The “south east” tag just names which way this leaf points.
The family is old: a vine-leaf mark already dressed up printed books by 1505, the “Aldine leaf” of early Venetian printing. This silhouette arrived later through Wingdings, Microsoft's symbol font, and reached Unicode in 2014. As of 2026, no separate social meaning is documented for the southeast direction.
How do you type 🙓?
Use the real Unicode character; a Wingdings lookalike will not travel. As of 2026 it is still a text symbol, not an emoji, so emoji pickers mostly skip it. In Word, type 1F653 and press AltX.
The trap hides in older documents: Wingdings drew its pictures over ordinary letter slots, so a leaf copied from an old file can revert to a letter or a private-use code showing nothing. A 2011 proposal mapped this shape to Wingdings glyph w-1212, giving the real character a code point that travels between systems.
Print-shop ornament: decoration, not a message.
Don't send it to mean something — alone, it says nothing.
Don't confuse it with
2Related characters
5
Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- Fleurons filled the blank space at chapter ends — decoration with a typesetting job.
Questions people ask
3Why does 🙓 look different everywhere?
Blame the font. As of 2026 it is a font-drawn text glyph, not vendor emoji art — the outline changes with the installed fonts, or collapses to an empty box.
Is 🙓 an emoji?
No. It is a text symbol, a dingbat ornament, though a font may colour it. The green emoji leaf is , a different character.
Can 🙓 work as a divider?
Yes, that is the family business — a short row of them does the classic fleuron job.
More like this
12
Collections with 🙓
2
How to type or find 🙓
- Search it as
- fleuron · wingdings · dingbat · ornament · flourish · divider · hedera · leaf symbol
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🙓\1F653Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.