About Triangular Bullet
Triangular Bullet is the Unicode character ‣ at codepoint U+2023 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
A solid right-pointing list marker. General category Po, in General Punctuation since Unicode 1.1, and East Asian Width Narrow — unlike bullet, which is Ambiguous, so this one's width is not context-dependent. It has no HTML named entity and no Windows-1252 slot, which is the practical difference between the two: one could be typed through the eight-bit era and one could not. The standard cross-references it to only two characters, U+220E END OF PROOF and U+25B8 BLACK RIGHT-POINTING SMALL TRIANGLE, and offers no annotation about how it should be used. Nothing in the data marks it as a disclosure or expand control; that reading is convention, not standard.
Typical uses
- Second-level markers in plain-text outlines, where the shape distinguishes a nested level
- Slide and note-taking bullets, where the marker is typed rather than styled
- Anywhere a marker should suggest direction rather than sit still
At a glance
- U+2023, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1; general category Po
- East Asian Width Narrow; line break class AL
- No HTML named entity; no Windows-1252 slot
- Cross-referenced only to end of proof and the black right-pointing small triangle
Historical Notes
Origins
It arrived with Unicode 1.1 in 1993, in the original General Punctuation block, in the same run as bullet and hyphen bullet. All three are punctuation; all three are list markers; only one of them got a Windows-1252 byte, and it was not this one.
Why the shape never became common
The character has been available for over three decades and does not appear in ordinary text. The likeliest reason is the one the encoding history points at: an eight-bit code page decided what could be typed for a generation, and by the time Unicode was everywhere, styled lists had removed the need to type a marker at all. That is an inference from the encoding history and from what published text shows, not something the standard states.
Not a disclosure triangle
Interfaces that draw an expandable row use a triangle, and this character is often assumed to be it. Unicode records no such role. Where a real interface needs that control it is normally an icon or a rotated shape in CSS, not this codepoint.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Triangular Bullet
To use the Triangular Bullet 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: '\2023';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2023' evaluates to ‣. In Python source, write '\u2023'.
The character encodes to E2 80 A3 as UTF-8 bytes and 2023 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8227.
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
- No HTML named entity exists. Use `‣` or `‣`, or the character itself in a UTF-8 document.
- No Windows-1252 slot, so it cannot survive a round trip through a legacy eight-bit pipeline the way bullet can.
- Font coverage is worth testing rather than assuming. It is a 1993 character in a common block, which is a reason for optimism and not a guarantee; check the faces you actually ship.
- East Asian Width is Narrow, so unlike bullet it will not change width depending on how a terminal resolves ambiguity.
- Pattern_Syntax applies, so identifier grammars following Unicode's rules will reject it.
Comparisons
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 this character appeared on none of a wide spread of pages: news home pages (the Guardian, NPR, the Verge, BBC News, Ars Technica, Asahi), documentation and reference (MDN's `list-style-type` page, English Wikipedia's main page and its article on standard deviation, Japanese Wikipedia's article on Japan, Chinese Wikipedia's on China), corporate and government pages (Apple, Nintendo, IKEA, gov.uk, the US Copyright Office), and RFC 9110 — 454,885 characters of plain-text HTTP specification. All loaded with their full text.
English Wikipedia's article on the bullet carried it once, as a specimen of itself. Bullet — the one list marker Windows-1252 made typable, at byte 0x95 — appeared twelve times over the same pages. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the triangle in a file browser?
Usually not. Disclosure controls are normally icons or CSS-rotated shapes. Unicode records no expand-or-collapse meaning for this character.
Does it have an HTML entity?
No named one. `‣` or `‣` will do it.
Why does it never turn up in text?
It has no Windows-1252 byte, so it could not be typed through the era that fixed which marks people use, and styled lists removed the reason to type any marker afterwards.
Is it the same as U+25B8?
No. Unicode cross-references the two, but the black right-pointing small triangle is a geometric shape; this is punctuation, meant to sit in a list.
Should I use it instead of a styled list?
Only in plain text. In HTML a real list gives assistive technology the structure the character cannot carry.