Upwards White Arrow From Bar

It marks Caps Lock — typing locked into capital letters. In both Unicode and the international keyboard standard (ISO/IEC 9995-7), ⇪ is the dedicated icon for the Caps Lock key. You'll spot it printed directly on Apple keyboards and many compact or European PC keyboards, as well as in shortcut guides and input menus.

The picture comes from how mechanical typewriters worked. After the Remington No. 2 introduced the Shift key in 1878 to put upper- and lowercase letters on the same typebars, holding the heavy mechanism down for a whole heading was tiring. Early 20th-century typewriters added a physical catch — called a shift lock by 1905–10 — to hold the carriage or basket in its raised position. In ⇪, the hollow upward arrow is Shift and the flat bar at the base is the latch holding it in place.

How does ⇪ differ from Shift (⇧) and Shift Lock (⇬)?

The base of the arrow shows whether and how the key locks. A plain outline arrow (⇧) is Shift: it works only while your finger holds the key down. Adding a bar underneath (⇪) means the key toggles on and stays active until pressed again.

On most modern keyboards, Caps Lock (⇪) affects only letters, so pressing the number keys still types 1, 2, 3 instead of !, @, #. True Shift Lock — marked by an arrow on a wider pedestal with a bar (⇬) — acts as if the Shift key itself is held down, shifting numbers and punctuation too. A few national layouts, such as the traditional French AZERTY and Swiss keyboards, still use a Shift Lock key so typists can enter accented capitals and top-row numbers continuously.