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🮎

upper half medium shade

Upper Half Medium Shade

🮎 shades a text cell's upper half. Sinclair's ZX81 used it for block graphics; Unicode keeps it for retro recreations and text art.

Text symbol

Search it as: zx81 · sinclair · block graphics · text art
Shows up in: Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What 🮎 means

It shades the upper half of a character cell.

ZX81 programs made pictures with semigraphics—shaded pieces of text cells. The ZX81 launched in 1981 after the ZX80 (1980); a 2019 proposal maps this tile to slot 0x0A in the ZX81 character set.

Why preserve this shade tile in Unicode?

To complete missing pieces of the ZX81 graphics set.

A 2016 proposal also cited software recreating the ZX81 and text art.

A retro screen-graphics tile.

In the ZX81 character set, byte `0x0A` means this tile; other encodings may assign it differently.

Don't confuse it with

▀

Upper Half Block

`▀` is solid across the upper half; 🮎 uses medium shading there.

Combination ideas

Adjacent cells extend the top-half shade into a wider band.

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 1FB8E, 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 medium shade”.

Linux

Ctrl+Shift+UType 1fb8e, then Enter or Space.

HTML

🮎

CSS

\1FB8E

Codes and encoding1 code points

HTML decimal

🮎

HTML hex

🮎

CSS content

content: "\1FB8E";

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

URL encoded

%F0%9F%AE%8E

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

Legacy computing935 symbols

𜰀𜰁𜰂𜰃𜰄𜰅𜰆𜰇𜰈𜰉𜰊𜰋