What □ means
□ marks an outlined square; context supplies its role.
The hollow or open square can mark an empty cell in a grid or outline a shape; nearby labels and symbols show which.
A recognizable ancestor appears around 1010 in a written account of a chessboard, where contrasting squares made the board usable. A 1283 illustration shows red and white squares.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Is □ a missing-glyph symbol?
No. □ is an assigned text character. When a font cannot display another character, it may show a private `.notdef` placeholder that can look similar.
How to type □
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 25A1, 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 square”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 25a1, then Enter or Space.
HTML
□CSS
\25A1Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
□
HTML hex
□
CSS content
content: "\25A1";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E2%96%A1
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.