About Rightwards Arrow Right Arrow
Rightwards Arrow Right Arrow is the Unicode character → at codepoint U+2192 in the Arrows block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The workhorse. General category Sm, Arrows block, Unicode 1.1, Math property, and a relation in Unicode's math-class table — which is the formal statement of what everyone already reads: the arrow asserts something, it does not combine two operands. East Asian Width Ambiguous, line-break class AI. Its single chart annotation is narrow and precise — "z notation total function" — one formal-methods reading among the several the character carries in practice. Five HTML names. No emoji property whatsoever, which is exactly why it belongs in running text: it takes your text colour and behaves inside a paragraph, where the coloured arrow from a chat app does not.
Typical uses
- Functions and mappings: A → B
- Limits, where it reads "approaches"
- Phonological rules, meaning "becomes, in this environment"
- Net forward reactions in chemistry
- "Goes to", "leads to" and "next" in ordinary prose
At a glance
- U+2192, 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 property in any form
Historical Notes
Origins
Arrows entered mathematical writing from diagrams rather than from typesetting, and no single first use is worth asserting here. What is checkable is where the modern conventions were written down, and how many of them there now are for one glyph.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Arrows block. The chart's only note is the Z notation reading, "total function" — a formal-methods convention rather than a general gloss. Unicode does not attempt to define what the arrow means; it records one specialist use and leaves the rest to the field.
Four fields, four grammars
Mathematics reads it as a map between sets and, in a limit, as "approaches". Phonology writes rules shaped A → B / C _ D and reads it "becomes". Chemistry is the strictest: on Wikipedia's article on chemical equations the arrow is listed against "net forward reaction", with different arrows reserved for reactions running both ways. The glyph is the same in all four; the grammar is not.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Rightwards Arrow Right Arrow
To use the Rightwards Arrow Right 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: '\2192';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2192' evaluates to →. In Python source, write '\u2192'.
The character encodes to E2 86 92 as UTF-8 bytes and 2192 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8594.
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
- Bidi_Mirrored is No. In right-to-left text the arrow keeps pointing right while the sentence runs left, which quietly reverses the meaning of a formula.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous, so it may take two terminal cells in a CJK locale.
- Five HTML names; → is the portable one to write.
- It is not the emoji right arrow. That is U+27A1, a different character with emoji properties, and no variation selector converts one into the other.
- Pattern_Syntax applies; no Windows-1252 slot; stable under all four normalisation forms.
In the Wild
The rightward arrow does more work than the other mathematical marks, and nearly all of it is real use rather than exposition.
The concentration is where you would expect. On 5 August 2026 Wikipedia's article on the material conditional carried 222, the article on functions 42, injective functions 40, category theory 29 and embeddings 18. The article on chemical equations carried nine, including the notation table that assigns this arrow specifically to a "net forward reaction". The article on phonological rules carried three, in rules of the form "l → ∅ / C ___#".
The instructive absence is a page of developer documentation about JavaScript's arrow functions, which contained 143 equals signs and not a single arrow. The name is a picture of ASCII, not of this character. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the emoji arrow?
No. This character has no emoji property at all. The coloured one is U+27A1, a separate character in a separate block.
Does it mean "implies"?
It can. So can rightwards double arrow. Which one an author uses is house style rather than a distinction, so read their notation section.
Is the long arrow just a stretched version?
No. Unicode encodes short and long arrows separately and treats them as carrying different conventions.
Why does it point the wrong way in Arabic text?
Because Bidi_Mirrored is No — the character is not mirrored by the layout. You have to substitute leftwards arrow yourself.