About White Right Pointing Index
White Right Pointing Index is the Unicode character ☞ at codepoint U+261E in the Miscellaneous Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The pointing hand of the printed margin — a fist with the index finger extended, aimed at the line that matters. U+261E is So in Miscellaneous Symbols, present since Unicode 1.1 (1993), and its chart entry carries one formal alias: "fist", tagged as the typographic term. It belongs to a run of six pointing hands at U+261A to U+261F, two solid and four hollow, in four directions. Of those six, exactly one carries any emoji property — the upward-pointing hand at U+261D — so this character renders in text colour at text size and will not follow you onto a phone keyboard. East Asian Width is Ambiguous and line break class is ID.
Typical uses
- Marking a passage for attention, the job it was cast in metal to do
- A cross-reference pointer in glossaries and indexes
- A typographic ornament with a long history and no modern default meaning
At a glance
- U+261E, Miscellaneous Symbols; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category So
- Formal alias: fist, given as the typographic term
- One of six pointing hands at U+261A to U+261F; only U+261D of the six carries an emoji property
- No emoji property here, so it renders in text colour at text size
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class ID; no HTML named entity
Historical Notes
Origins
The hand drawn in the margin is a manuscript practice with centuries behind it, and the scholarly account of it — including the name manicule, and how individual annotators drew their own — belongs to that scholarship rather than to the encoding. What can be read off the standard is narrower.
Unicode
Present since Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in Miscellaneous Symbols. The six pointing hands were encoded together as a set: black and white, left, right, up and down. The chart entry gives "fist" as a formal alias and marks it as the typographic term, and cross-references a sideways variant at U+1F599 and a partial form at U+1FBC1.
The emoji expansion went round it
When the pointing hands people actually send were brought into Unicode, they were encoded fresh at their own codepoints as backhand indexes, and this set was left where it was. The one exception is the upward-pointing sibling at U+261D, which carries Emoji, Extended_Pictographic and Emoji_Modifier_Base and therefore takes skin tone modifiers. The other five, including this one, carry no emoji property at all. So the oldest pointing hand in the standard is the one that stayed text, and the practical consequence is that it behaves like a letter and not like a picture.
Developer Notes
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How to Use White Right Pointing Index
To use the White Right Pointing Index 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: '\261E';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u261E' evaluates to ☞. In Python source, write '\u261E'.
The character encodes to E2 98 9E as UTF-8 bytes and 261E as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 9758.
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 emoji property, so it inherits text colour, size and line height. It cannot be made to render as a coloured glyph.
- Its upward-pointing sibling at U+261D does carry emoji properties and does take skin-tone modifiers. Substituting one for the other changes the character class entirely.
- No named HTML entity. Write ☞ or ☞.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous: full-width in a CJK font context, half-width elsewhere.
- Line break class ID, so a line may break after it as it would after an ideograph.
- Font coverage is worth testing rather than assuming. It is an old character in a widely implemented block, but nothing in the standard obliges a typeface to carry it.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 Wikipedia's article about the typographic index carried nine of them, and several are running text rather than chart cells: the article writes "they might format a term with small caps and a manicule, as ☞ example" and uses the glyph again in its own footnotes.
A punctuation navigation table carried at the foot of several typography articles accounts for most of the rest, listing it beside the fleuron, the lozenge and the pilcrow. That one shared template is why the mark turns up on as many pages as it does.
None of those pages used the hand to point at anything. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is it an emoji?
No. It carries no emoji property and always renders as text. The pointing hands on a phone keyboard are separate, later characters.
What is a manicule?
The scholarly name for the pointing hand drawn in a margin. Unicode does not use it; the chart's formal alias here is "fist", marked as the typographic term.
Are there other directions?
Yes — six hands at U+261A to U+261F, two solid and four hollow, pointing left, right, up and down.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Use ☞ or ☞.