What ☼ means
It marks the Sun or sunshine; maps use it as a compass.
A rayed Sun appears on Bianchini’s planisphere, a Roman marble sky chart dated 175–225 CE. It shows the Sun as a figure wearing a ring of rays. The chart combines Greek and Chaldean zodiacs with Egyptian decans, star groups tied to ten-day periods. This image resembles ☼ but does not prove direct descent.
A 12th-century astrology book from the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire draws the Sun as a disk with one ray. Renaissance Europe’s separate sun sign, ☉, has a dot inside its circle. These images share a subject, not a proven ancestry with ☼.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why 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 ☼
☼\263CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.