About Floppy Disk
Floppy Disk is the Unicode character 💾 at codepoint U+1F4BE in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
One of two floppies in the standard, and the only one on a keyboard. U+1F4BE sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Its chart entry carries four formal aliases — flexible disk cartridge, floppy disc, floppy and diskette — and a cross-reference to U+1F5AA BLACK HARD SHELL FLOPPY DISK, which is not an emoji at all: it carries no emoji property, so it has no colour presentation and no place in the emoji keyboard. Unicode's test data files this one with the computer objects, beside the laptop, the minidisc, the optical disc and the battery.
Typical uses
- Saving and storage, literal or as an interface metaphor
- Retro computing contexts, where the object itself is the point
- Backups and archives, which is the storage sense extended
At a glance
- U+1F4BE, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Four formal aliases in the chart, and one cross-reference to U+1F5AA
- U+1F5AA is not an emoji, so only this one renders in colour
- No HTML named entity. Write 💾 or 💾
Historical Notes
Origins
How a 3.5-inch diskette outlived itself as an interface icon is a story outside the standard entirely. What the encoding adds is that Unicode holds two of them and made only one an emoji.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. An encyclopaedia article on the floppy disk states that the object is present in many interface symbol libraries and has had a Unicode code point since 2010 — which matches the version data exactly, from a source that is not Unicode.
Two disks, one keyboard
U+1F5AA BLACK HARD SHELL FLOPPY DISK sits a hundred and forty-four positions further along the same block and carries the alias disk plus a cross-reference back to this character. It has no emoji property, no emoji presentation and no entry in the standard's emoji test data. So the pair is a good illustration of what the emoji properties actually decide: both are assigned characters with names and glyphs, and only one of them will ever appear in colour on a phone.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Floppy Disk
To use the Floppy Disk 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: '\1F4BE';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F4BE}' evaluates to 💾. In Python source, write '\U0001F4BE'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 BE as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DCBE as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128190.
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 other floppy, U+1F5AA, is a text symbol rather than an emoji. Do not treat the two as presentation variants of each other.
- Its formal aliases — flexible disk cartridge, floppy disc, floppy, diskette — are searchable metadata, not alternative characters.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DCBE 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 floppy disk uses this character exactly once — in a sentence noting that the object is present in many interface symbol libraries and has had a Unicode code point since 2010.
One use in the whole article, and it is the sentence about the character rather than about the disk. Elsewhere the character is being defined: an entry in CLDR's annotation data, a cell in a code chart.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Are there two floppy disk characters?
Yes. This one and U+1F5AA BLACK HARD SHELL FLOPPY DISK. Only this one is an emoji.
Why does it have four aliases?
Unicode records formal aliases where a character is known by several names. Here they are flexible disk cartridge, floppy disc, floppy and diskette.
Is it the save icon?
The character is a picture of a diskette. That an interface uses the same picture for saving is a convention outside the standard, which takes no position on it.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 💾 or 💾.