Wide-headed rightwards heavy barb arrow

It points right: next step, go this way, look here. Between two words it reads as “leads to” or “then” (Input 🡺 Output, Monday 🡺 Friday). At the start of a line it can work as a decorative bullet. Alone in a message it is a bare direction, so the words around it carry the meaning. Its thickness mostly adds emphasis; it has no mood of its own.

The name describes the drawing. A barb arrow has a head whose two sides sweep back like the barb of a fish hook, instead of a closed triangle. Wide-headed means the head is much broader than the shaft. Heavy is the stroke weight: the family comes in five weights, light, plain, medium, heavy and very heavy, each pointing in eight directions, forty arrows in all. Which weight you see is a matter of design, not meaning.

You are likely to meet it in documents, slides, bulleted lists and the “fancy arrow” collections people paste into bios and posts. It is a text character, so it normally takes the colour and size of the surrounding text and does not turn into a coloured picture the way ➡ does on phones.

Where does this arrow come from?

From the Wingdings symbol fonts, encoded in Unicode in 2014. Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes designed the fonts Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars in 1990–1991; Microsoft acquired them and released them, reorganised, as Wingdings in 1992. Those fonts put pictures in the slots of ordinary letters, so an arrow typed in Wingdings turned into an unrelated letter the moment the font was missing.

Unicode 7.0 fixed that by giving hundreds of Wingdings and Webdings symbols code points of their own, among them the whole barb arrow family in the Supplemental Arrows-C block. That is why this arrow has a fussy official name: it had to be told apart from thirty-nine siblings.

The arrow itself is far older than any font. A 1737 diagram of a waterwheel used one to show which way the water ran, maps took it up for routes and rivers, and in 1922 the mathematician David Hilbert used an arrow for logical implication, “if this, then that”. The exact drawing of 🡺 comes from Wingdings, but the readings people give it, from “turn right” to “leads to”, are the ones arrows have carried for centuries.