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⧖

white hourglass

White Hourglass

⧖ is the simple form of an alchemical hour sign, also called a vertical bowtie symbol. “White” describes its hollow style, not a fixed screen color; its ornate counterpart is 🝮. In an isolated message, the glyph alone does not reveal the sender’s intent.

Text symbol

Also called: vertical bowtie · white framus
Search it as: alchemy hour symbol · hour sign
Shows up in: Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ⧖ means

It marked an hour in alchemical writing. Alchemy was a historical craft concerned with changing substances. Unicode lists “vertical bowtie” and “white framus” as alternate names. A 2025 Unicode proposal reproduces the simple form in a 1671 copperplate and later 18th-century tables; these examples establish use by 1671, not its invention date.

Don't confuse it with

⌛

Hourglass Done

⧖ vs ⌛: ⧖ is the alchemical sign; the 2025 Unicode proposal describes ⌛ as the pictorial hourglass used in modern interfaces.

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 29D6, 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 “white hourglass”.

Linux

Ctrl+Shift+UType 29d6, then Enter or Space.

HTML

⧖

CSS

\29D6

Codes and encoding1 code points

HTML decimal

⧖

HTML hex

⧖

CSS content

content: "\29D6";

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

URL encoded

%E2%A7%96

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

Maths & numbers1,835 symbols

1️⃣📏📐✖️➕➖➗🟰♾️#️⃣*️⃣0️⃣