The Dingbats block was full. Zapf's ornaments filled it in 1991 and there it sat, until Unicode 6.0 in 2010 needed somewhere to put three arithmetic symbols from the Japanese carrier emoji sets and found exactly three unassigned slots at the end of it. ➕, ➖ and ➗ went in. Which is why this character shares a block with fleurons and printers' stars rather than living with the mathematical operators, where it plainly belongs.
It is not the division sign. Division sign — ÷, U+00F7, also called the obelus — is the character for arithmetic, and it has an odd past: before it meant division it was a scribal mark used to flag doubtful passages in manuscripts. ➗ is an emoji that resembles it. It arrives coloured, at icon size, with emoji presentation by default, and it will ignore your font entirely.
So the rule is simple and broken constantly. In an equation, a spreadsheet formula, or anything meant to read as mathematics, use ÷. Use ➗ when you want a button — a calculator key, a maths app icon, a school-subject label in a heading. The same split applies to plus and minus, its two neighbours, against an ordinary + and −.
About Divide
Divide is the Unicode character ➗ at codepoint U+2797 in the Dingbats block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Divide
To use the Divide 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: '\2797';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2797' evaluates to ➗. In Python source, write '\u2797'.
The character encodes to E2 9E 97 as UTF-8 bytes and 2797 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 10135.
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.