Teardrop-Barbed Rightwards Arrow

It guides the eye to whatever follows it. In print design, a decorative symbol like this is called a dingbat—a small ornament used to dress up text or organize a page. Unlike a plain technical arrow, ➺ is chosen for its curved, calligraphic look: a thin shaft ending in two soft, teardrop-shaped barbs. People drop it into social media bios, notes, and formatted lists to point toward a link, introduce a list item, or connect two short phrases.

Printers in the 19th century used reusable metal type ornaments and tiny illustrations to decorate pages and direct the reader's gaze. Unicode's dingbat arrows come from ITC Zapf Dingbats, a classic symbol typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released in 1978. Many fancy arrows in that collection exist only in a right-pointing version because page-layout software in the 1980s and early 1990s could easily rotate a single character to point up, down, or left.