🔍

Loading symbols…

››

▀

upper half block

Upper Half Block

In terminal art, ▀ fills the top half of a fixed-width character cell. Give the filled half a foreground color and the exposed lower half a background color, and one character carries two stacked color regions.

Text symbol

Also called: half block · top half block
Search it as: terminal graphics · text graphics · terminal pixel · ANSI block
Shows up in: Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ▀ means

It fills the upper half; foreground and background colors supply two regions. In two-color cell graphics, ▀ paints the upper region while the terminal background remains visible below. Repeat it to build bars, stripes, or compact pictures.

The family preserves simple graphics from fixed-width text displays. Its source standards include IBM PC Code Page 437, an older character set, Chinese GB 2312, Korean KS X 1001, and several terminal graphics sets. Similar Videotex mosaic characters were unified with members of the family.

Why does ▀ look wrong in my terminal?

Check cell metrics and renderer settings first. Font fallback, cell width, or line spacing can leave gaps or misalign adjacent blocks. As of 2026, VS Code's GPU-accelerated terminal can render Block Elements itself instead of relying on the font, so ▀ may look different there.

A technical character-cell graphic; decorative use reads as a solid upper band.

For the top half, ▀ is the right fill; ▄ puts color on the bottom.

Don't confuse it with

▄

Lower Half Block

The lower-half block ▄ fills the bottom; ▀ fills the top, so their color roles reverse.

█

Full Block

It fills the whole cell, leaving no exposed half for a second color.

▔

Upper One Eighth Block

It is only a thin upper strip, about one eighth of a cell's height.

Combination ideas

Designed terminal-art bar: the repeated top fills form one continuous band.

Designed side-by-side contrast: the first cell fills the top, the next the bottom.

Questions people ask

Why 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.

How to type ▀

Windows (Word)

Alt+XType 2580, then Alt+X to get ▀.

Windows

Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).

macOS

Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “upper half block”.

Linux

Ctrl+Shift+UType 2580, then Enter or Space.

HTML

▀

CSS

\2580

Character map

In a system character map, search for “Upper Half Block”; menu steps vary by operating system.

Unicode escape

To type ▀ with a Unicode escape in JavaScript, write `\u2580` in a string; other languages use their own syntax.

Terminal color

Print ▀ with foreground and background color settings; the filled top uses the foreground, the lower half the background.

Codes and encoding1 code points

HTML decimal

▀

HTML hex

▀

CSS content

content: "\2580";

Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.

URL encoded

%E2%96%80

On screen

Code points

JS .length

UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

Lines & boxes160 symbols

─━│┃┄┅┆┇┈┉┊┋