About High Voltage
High Voltage is the Unicode character ⚡ at codepoint U+26A1 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
A lightning bolt whose formal name is HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN and whose chart aliases are "thunder" and "lightning symbol". U+26A1 is So in Miscellaneous Symbols, added in Unicode 4.0 (2003), and unlike the older symbols around it it carries Emoji_Presentation — so it arrives as a coloured icon by default, in plain text, without anything being asked for. Turning that off takes U+FE0E, the text variation selector. East Asian Width is Wide, which is a consequence of the same emoji status: it takes a full-width cell. It has no HTML named entity. The chart cross-references a lightning mood symbol at U+1F5F2.
Typical uses
- Electrical hazard marking, which is what the name records
- Speed, power and urgency, which is what the aliases predicted and what the usage became
- Interface badges where a bolt is shorthand for something fast or instant
At a glance
- U+26A1, Miscellaneous Symbols; Unicode 4.0 (2003); general category So
- Chart aliases: thunder, lightning symbol
- Emoji_Presentation — coloured by default; U+FE0E forces the monochrome text form
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class AL; no HTML named entity
- Not a weather glyph: the cloud-with-lightning characters are separate
Historical Notes
Origins
The bolt as a hazard marking is an engineering convention older than the encoding, and this page does not attribute it. The date the standard gives is the checkable part.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 4.0, released in 2003 — later than most of the Miscellaneous Symbols block, which dates from 1.1 in 1993. The chart entry carries two equals-sign aliases, "thunder" and "lightning symbol", alongside the formal name. Both are recorded by the standard itself rather than being informal readings, which is unusual: it is one of the few characters whose eventual popular meaning was written into its chart entry from the start.
Emoji by default, and that was a decision
Of the 256 assigned characters in Miscellaneous Symbols, 83 carry the Emoji property and only 31 carry Emoji_Presentation. This is one of the 31. The difference is not cosmetic: a character with Emoji_Presentation is rendered as a picture unless something asks otherwise, so it cannot be used quietly as a typographic mark the way an ordinary dingbat can. Across the whole standard 1,219 codepoints carry Emoji_Presentation and 152 of them, this one included, also accept U+FE0E to force text.
Developer Notes
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| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
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How to Use High Voltage
To use the High Voltage 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: '\26A1';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u26A1' evaluates to ⚡. In Python source, write '\u26A1'.
The character encodes to E2 9A A1 as UTF-8 bytes and 26A1 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 9889.
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
- Emoji presentation is the default. In body copy it arrives coloured and at icon size whether or not that was wanted.
- U+FE0E after it forces the monochrome text form. This is not theoretical: Wikipedia's high voltage article writes the character followed by U+FE0E in order to show the sign rather than the emoji.
- East Asian Width Wide, so it takes a full-width cell and will not align with narrow text characters in a monospaced column.
- No named HTML entity. Write ⚡ or ⚡.
- It is not weather notation. The cloud-with-lightning and cloud-with-lightning-and-rain characters are separate codepoints; this is the abstract bolt.
- The cloud in the same block behaves the opposite way — text by default, emoji only with U+FE0F.
In the Wild
Wikipedia's article on high voltage writes: the Unicode text character representing "high voltage" is U+26A1, the symbol "⚡︎" — and the character there is followed by U+FE0E, the text variation selector. An encyclopaedia writing about the character has to actively suppress its emoji default in order to display what it is describing. That is the mechanism visible in the wild rather than in a specification.
The opposite case is a large open-source list of Go projects, which describes a database tool as "⚡ instant, realtime, high-performance" — the bare character, no selector, rendering as the coloured emoji. It appears otherwise as code-chart and presentation-table cells on the Miscellaneous Symbols article.
Those two are the character's whole range in one pair of pages: the hazard sign that has to be forced, and the bolt that means fast. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why is it always coloured?
Because it carries Emoji_Presentation, which makes the emoji form the default. Follow it with U+FE0E to get the monochrome sign.
Is it a weather symbol?
No. The cloud-with-lightning characters are the meteorological ones. This is the abstract bolt, named as a high voltage sign.
Does it mean danger or speed?
Both are in use. Unicode's own chart records "thunder" and "lightning symbol" as aliases beside the formal name, so the ambiguity is older than the emoji.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Use ⚡ or ⚡.