pointing down
Hands and gestures
What it means when sent
Points down. It marks a link about to follow or the next thing coming, and in a post it says โit is in the reply belowโ.
Official name vs. real use
The name Unicode gave it and the way people use it are not the same. If you searched your way here, the second one is usually what you were after.
- Official name
- backhand index pointing down
- What people call it
- pointing down
- Code point
- U+1F447
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Gestures split by country: the same picture is praise in one place and an insult in another. Each entry says where.
Using emojis
- Tap the character to copy it and paste it anywhere โ it is text, not an image, so its size follows the font around it.
- Sender and receiver on different devices see different drawings. Apple, Google and Samsung each draw their own, and for some emojis that changes the meaning (๐, ๐ ).
- At work, an emoji standing in for a sentence invites misreading. In some countries a bare ๐ reads as a brush-off.
- Putting emojis in a page title does not help search ranking โ they are usually stripped from the result.
- Skin-tone variants are not listed here. Only the base form is, because the meaning does not change with them.
Common questions
Q. What does ๐ mean?
Points down. It marks a link about to follow or the next thing coming, and in a post it says โit is in the reply belowโ.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it backhand index pointing down, code point U+1F447. It sits under Hands and gestures.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.