About Leftwards Arrow Left Arrow
Leftwards Arrow Left Arrow is the Unicode character ← at codepoint U+2190 in the Arrows block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The plain leftward arrow, and one of the four compass arrows Unicode encoded first. General category Sm, Arrows block, Unicode 1.1. Unicode's own math-class table — the data file behind UTR #25, revision 15 — files every arrow in this block as a relation rather than an operator, which is why a typesetter spaces it like an equals sign and not like a plus. East Asian Width is Ambiguous and the line-break class is AI, so a terminal may give it one cell or two depending on the locale it thinks it is in. HTML names it five ways. It carries no emoji property of any kind, so it cannot render as a coloured glyph in any font, and Bidi_Mirrored is No: the direction lives in the character, not in the layout.
Typical uses
- Assignment in APL, in Smalltalk and in published pseudocode
- "Back", "previous" and "undo" in interface copy
- Mappings drawn right to left in mathematics
- Naming a keyboard key in documentation
At a glance
- U+2190, Arrows; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Sm
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI; Bidi_Mirrored No
- HTML: ←, ←, ←, ←, ←
- No Windows-1252 slot and no emoji form, unlike left right arrow
Historical Notes
Origins
The story people tell about this arrow is a keyboard story: that ASCII carried one in its 1963 edition and dropped it four years later, and that everything since has been a substitute. That account is the received one rather than something confirmed against the two standards side by side. What is checkable is the residue — the languages that kept the real character, and the ones that assembled a picture of it out of ASCII.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Arrows block. The chart gives this character exactly one cross-reference, to U+20EA COMBINING LEFTWARDS ARROW OVERLAY, a combining form that strikes a leftward arrow across whatever precedes it. There is no annotation and no alias.
Where it survived
APL is where the character is still typed rather than drawn. Wikipedia's article on APL carried thirteen of them on 5 August 2026, in expressions of the form n ← 4 5 6 7; its article on assignment in computer science lists the arrow against APL, Smalltalk and Atari 2600 BASIC Programming, and every other row in that table is ASCII.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Leftwards Arrow Left Arrow
To use the Leftwards Arrow Left Arrow 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: '\2190';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2190' evaluates to ←. In Python source, write '\u2190'.
The character encodes to E2 86 90 as UTF-8 bytes and 2190 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8592.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- East Asian Width is Ambiguous. In a terminal set to a CJK locale it may occupy two cells and break your column alignment; in a Western locale it takes one.
- Bidi_Mirrored is No, and that is the trap. Drop it into Arabic or Hebrew text and it keeps pointing left while the sentence around it runs the other way, so an expression can end up reading backwards through its own argument.
- Five HTML names exist. Write ← — the long forms are MathML-era spellings and the short ones are not more portable.
- Pattern_Syntax applies, so identifier grammars that follow Unicode's rules reject it outright.
- Stable under all four normalisation forms, and it has no Windows-1252 slot, so it cannot round-trip through a legacy eight-bit pipeline.
In the Wild
The leftward arrow's use is concentrated to the point of comedy. On 5 August 2026 Wikipedia's article on APL carried thirteen of them, the arrow appearing as live code rather than as a description.
The single most telling occurrence is on the article about assignment, which carried exactly one — in a table row reading "variable ← expression", tagged to APL, Smalltalk and Atari 2600 BASIC Programming. The same page carried eighty-nine equals signs. One character makes the point about the other.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the arrow on my keyboard?
The key is labelled with a shape like this one, but the character a cursor key sends is not this codepoint. This is a printable text character; the key sends a control sequence.
Why do languages write <- instead?
Because the real arrow was not on the keyboard when the conventions were set. Two ASCII characters imitating the shape were cheaper than one character nobody could type.
Will it flip in right-to-left text?
No. Bidi_Mirrored is No for every arrow in this block, so the glyph stays as drawn. If you need it to point the other way in an Arabic or Hebrew context, swap in rightwards arrow yourself.
Can I get an emoji version?
Not of this character. It has no emoji property at all — no variation selector will turn it into a coloured button.