What means
It came from the Sharp MZ-700 display set. Introduced in 1982, the computer’s European alternate table assigned it to 0x51; the 2021 Unicode proposal records that mapping.
On the Sharp MZ-700, alternate glyphs were not keys: BASIC POKE put them in video memory for games that built pictures from ready-made character tiles.
What does mean when someone sends it?
Read the bomb literally first. A retro-computing conversation may point to an old MZ screen; elsewhere, surrounding words decide the sender’s intent.
Its image is explicitly nuclear; keep the tone sober.
Avoid it around grief, war, or nuclear danger; the picture can sound flippant.
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
9
How to type or find
- Search it as
- sharp mz · mz-700 · bomb symbol · retro computer
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜱡\1CC61𜱡 in HTML source.\U0001CC61 inside a Python string literal.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.