About Battery
Battery is the Unicode character 🔋 at codepoint U+1F50B in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
A full cell, and half of a pair. U+1F50B sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation, so it renders in colour unaided. Its single chart annotation is a cross-reference to U+1FAAB LOW BATTERY, which arrived eleven years later in Unicode 14.0 — before that there was no drained counterpart to point at. CLDR gives it a keyword list of exactly one word, battery — one of only twenty-three single-keyword entries among the 1,975 in the English annotation file. Unicode's test data files both cells in the same subgroup as the laptop, the floppy disk, the optical disc and the abacus, fourteen fully qualified entries in all.
Typical uses
- Charge and power in the literal sense, which is what the name and the keyword give
- Paired with U+1FAAB when a full and an empty state are both needed
- Not as a progress indicator — a pictograph has no partial states
At a glance
- U+1F50B, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Cross-referenced to U+1FAAB LOW BATTERY, added in Unicode 14.0
- One of twenty-three single-keyword entries in CLDR's English annotations
- No HTML named entity. Write 🔋 or 🔋
Historical Notes
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. The drained counterpart, U+1FAAB LOW BATTERY, came with Unicode 14.0 in 2021 and sits in Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A — a different block entirely, because Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs had been full for years by then.
A cross-reference added in one direction and answered in the other
U+1FAAB's chart entry points at U+1F50B and U+1F50B's points back, which is how Unicode records that two characters are meant to be read against each other. It is worth noticing what that costs: eleven years and two blocks separate them, so any font or keyboard that predates 2021 has the full battery and not the empty one. The two are a matched pair by annotation and by subgroup, never by address.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Battery
To use the Battery symbol (🔋) in HTML, insert the
entity 🔋 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🔋 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F50B';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F50B}' evaluates to 🔋. In Python source, write '\U0001F50B'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 94 8B as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DD0B as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128267.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.
Things to know
- The empty counterpart is U+1FAAB, from Unicode 14.0, so it is much newer and much less widely supported.
- A pictograph cannot show a partial state. For a real charge indicator use a platform control and keep the character for prose.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DD0B in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 🔋 or 🔋.
In the Wild
An encyclopaedia article on the electric battery carries this character in its summary box, under a field labelled for the Unicode character — the glyph standing in as part of the definition of the object rather than as decoration.
That is a narrow but real use, and it is not the usual one. Elsewhere the character is being defined rather than deployed: an entry in CLDR's annotation data, a cell in a code chart. Pages change; this is what that one showed on the day.
FAQ
Is there an empty battery emoji?
Yes, U+1FAAB LOW BATTERY, added in Unicode 14.0. The two chart entries cross-reference each other.
Can it show a charge level?
No. It is one character with one glyph. Anything showing a percentage is a platform control, not a character.
What about the lightning bolt?
That is high voltage, U+26A1, a different character in a different block with a much older and more electrical history.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 🔋 or 🔋.