About Capricorn
Capricorn is the Unicode character ♑ at codepoint U+2651 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
No sign in the set gives a reader more trouble at small sizes. The mark is a loop trailing into a tail, and the usual telling is that it fuses a goat's horn with a fish's tail — Capricorn being the sea-goat, goat in front, fish behind. Nobody has pinned the glyph's derivation down to everyone's satisfaction, and the shape drifts noticeably between typefaces: some cut it as two linked strokes, others as something closer to a cursive ligature.
The goat emoji U+1F410 is a separate character and a separate idea. That one is an animal; this one is a slot in a twelve-part system running from U+2648 through to Aquarius at U+2652 and Pisces after it. Substituting the animal for the sign in a horoscope layout breaks the visual set, because the twelve signs are designed to sit together at one weight.
Typical uses
- Horoscope and birth-chart layouts alongside the other eleven signs
- Astronomical notation for the constellation and the Tropic of Capricorn
- Profile shorthand for a late-December to January birth date
Also encoded as
- Unicode 1.1 (1993), Miscellaneous Symbols
- DoCoMo 0xF8B0, KDDI 0xF670, SoftBank 0xF7E8 in the legacy Japanese carrier sets
- Emoji_Presentation by default; U+FE0E after it forces the flat text glyph
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python | |
| Linux (IBus) |
How to Use Capricorn
To use the Capricorn 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: '\2651';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2651' evaluates to ♑. In Python source, write '\u2651'.
The character encodes to E2 99 91 as UTF-8 bytes and 2651 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 9809.
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.