About Rightwards Double Arrow Right Double Arrow
Rightwards Double Arrow Right Double Arrow is the Unicode character ⇒ at codepoint U+21D2 in the Arrows block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The doubled shaft. General category Sm, Arrows block, Unicode 1.1, Math property, and a relation in Unicode's math-class table. East Asian Width Ambiguous, line-break class AI. Four HTML names, and one of them is unusually blunt about the meaning: alongside ⇒ and ⇒ the entity table carries ⇒, so the character's logical reading is written into the web platform's own data rather than left to convention. The chart itself gives no annotation. No emoji property. Bidi_Mirrored is No, and on this character that is not a footnote: an implication that keeps pointing right inside right-to-left text points backwards through its own argument.
Typical uses
- Material implication in logic and mathematics
- "Therefore" and "it follows that" in proof steps
- Rule and rewrite notation in formal grammars
- Conclusions in slide decks and lecture notes
At a glance
- U+21D2, Arrows; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Sm
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI; Bidi_Mirrored No
- HTML: ⇒, ⇒, ⇒, ⇒
- No Windows-1252 slot, no emoji property
Historical Notes
Origins
Notation for implication has never settled on one mark: a horseshoe, a single arrow and this double arrow have all done the job, and the choice has generally followed a school rather than a rule. That much is uncontroversial; which author established which convention is the sort of claim this page does not assert.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Arrows block, with no annotation in the chart. The standard encodes the arrow and says nothing about implication — it is the WHATWG entity table that names the meaning, offering ⇒ as one of four spellings.
The competing arrow
Wikipedia's article on the material conditional lists three notations side by side for the same connective — A ⇒ B, A ⊃ B and A → B — and names the codepoints of the first and the last. Both arrows appear on that page, this one five times and the single arrow 222 times. Reading a distinction into which arrow an author chose is unsafe unless the author states one.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Rightwards Double Arrow Right Double Arrow
To use the Rightwards Double Arrow Right Double 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: '\21D2';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u21D2' evaluates to ⇒. In Python source, write '\u21D2'.
The character encodes to E2 87 92 as UTF-8 bytes and 21D2 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8658.
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, and this is the character where that hurts most. Move a formula into Arabic or Hebrew and the arrow keeps its direction while the text reverses; substituting the leftwards double arrow by hand is the only fix.
- Four HTML names. ⇒ is the compact one; ⇒ is the semantic one and is equally valid.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous, so a CJK-locale terminal may give it two cells.
- Not an emoji, and no variation selector will make it one.
- Pattern_Syntax applies; no Windows-1252 slot; stable under all four normalisation forms.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 the double arrow was heavily outnumbered by the single rightward arrow on the same pages — sixteen occurrences against 433, about one to twenty-seven.
Wikipedia's article on the material conditional carried five, in a table of notations that sets A ⇒ B beside A ⊃ B and A → B for the same connective. The article on mathematical proof carried four. Natural logarithm, injective functions, rotation and the Del operator carried one or two each, and the Arrows block article one as a chart specimen.
What that supports is the caution rather than a rule: on the pages that used both arrows, neither was reserved for a distinct job that the text bothered to state. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Does the double arrow mean something different from the single one?
Not reliably. Both are used for implication. Authors who draw a distinction say so in their notation section; most do not.
Why is there an HTML entity called ⇒?
Because the entity table names the character's logical reading. Unicode's own chart gives it no annotation at all.
Will it flip in right-to-left text?
No. Bidi_Mirrored is No, so you must substitute the leftwards double arrow yourself if the direction matters.
Is it an emoji?
No, and it cannot be made one.