About Upwards Arrow Up Arrow
Upwards Arrow Up Arrow is the Unicode character ↑ at codepoint U+2191 in the Arrows block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The vertical companion to the four original compass arrows: general category Sm, Arrows block, Unicode 1.1, with the Math property and a relation class in Unicode's math-class table. East Asian Width Ambiguous, line-break class AI. The chart carries one annotation and it is not about direction at all — the standard notes its use in the International Phonetic Alphabet for egressive airflow. HTML names it four ways. It has no emoji property, which is the whole distinction between it and the chunky coloured up arrow people tap on a phone: that is a different character in a different block, and no variation selector bridges the two.
Typical uses
- Direction, rise and increase in prose, tables and interfaces
- Naming a keyboard key, or a modifier, in documentation
- Chemistry, marking a gas evolved from a reaction
- IPA, for egressive airflow
At a glance
- U+2191, 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; the coloured up arrow is a separate character
Historical Notes
Origins
The upward arrow needs no origin story: a line with a head on it is about as old as diagrams. What the record here can date is the encoding, and one specialist use that Unicode thought worth writing down.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Arrows block, alongside the left, right and down arrows it was designed to match in weight and length. Its only annotation in the chart is phonetic — "IPA: egressive airflow" — which is a reminder that the character had technical users before it had interface designers.
The other up arrow
Unicode later encoded a second up arrow, U+2B06, in a block added for symbol completeness, and that one does carry emoji properties. The two are not interchangeable, and a font may set one beautifully while leaving the other flat. Mixing the two families inside one set of directional controls is the usual cause of arrows that do not match each other.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Upwards Arrow Up Arrow
To use the Upwards Arrow Up 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: '\2191';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2191' evaluates to ↑. In Python source, write '\u2191'.
The character encodes to E2 86 91 as UTF-8 bytes and 2191 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8593.
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 Ambiguous, so its cell width in a terminal depends on the locale rather than on the character.
- Bidi_Mirrored is No. Vertical arrows have nothing to mirror, so this costs nothing here — but it is the same property that makes the horizontal arrows misbehave in right-to-left text.
- Four HTML names. ↑ is the one to write.
- It is not the emoji up arrow. If you need the coloured button, you need U+2B06 followed by a variation selector; adding a selector to this character does nothing.
- Pattern_Syntax applies; stable under all four normalisation forms; no Windows-1252 slot.
In the Wild
This character is everywhere on Wikipedia and almost none of it means "up".
Nearly every occurrence on 5 August 2026 sat at or after the Notes, References or See-also boundary of a Wikipedia article. They are the citation backlink: one arrow per reference, taking a reader from the footnote to the place in the article that cited it. On the Golden ratio article alone that is 126 of them. Whatever the character was encoded for, this is the use that dominates it there: a navigation affordance in a reference list.
The occurrences in article body text are few. Four are chart specimens on the article about the Arrows block, one is in a logic table, and four more are the real thing, all on the article about chemical equations, where the arrow marks a gas leaving a reaction — "used in some cases to indicate formation of a gas ↑ or precipitate ↓", and then in the equations themselves.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the same as the emoji up arrow?
No. The coloured one is U+2B06, in a different block, with emoji properties this character does not have. They are not substitutes in code.
What does it mean in chemistry?
A gas evolved from the reaction. The downward arrow is the matching notation for a precipitate.
Why does Wikipedia use it in references?
As a backlink from a footnote to its citation point. That is what nearly every occurrence on a Wikipedia article is.
Does it change size in a terminal?
Its East Asian Width is Ambiguous, so a terminal in a CJK locale may give it two cells. Test rather than assume.