This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as electrolysis.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+21AF forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The CLDR project calls this character “downwards zigzag arrow” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: arrow, downwards, zigzag.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The symbol ↯ (U+21AF↯DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW) is a Unicode character. It may refer to:
a contradiction (the relationship between incompatible propositions) in mathematical logic
electrolysis (the process of using an electrical current to separate molecules) in chemistry
a radio location in rallying
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
8623
UTF-8
E2 86 AF
UTF-16
21 AF
UTF-32
00 00 21 AF
URL-Quoted
%E2%86%AF
HTML hex reference
↯
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
↯
alias
electrolysis
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 36 C9 35
RFC 5137
\u'21AF'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u21AF
C and C++
\u21AF
C#
\u21AF
CSS
\0021AF
Excel
=UNICHAR(8623)
Go
\u21AF
JavaScript
\u21AF
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{21af}
JSON
\u21AF
Java
\u21AF
Lua
\u{21AF}
Matlab
char(8623)
Perl
"\x{21AF}"
PHP
\u{21af}
PostgreSQL
U&'\21AF'
PowerShell
`u{21AF}
Python
\u21AF
Ruby
\u{21af}
Rust
\u{21af}
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