This character is a Math Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as backward difference, gradient and del.
The glyph is not a composition. Its width in East Asian texts is determined by its context. It can be displayed wide or narrow. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. If its East Asian Width is “narrow”, U+2207 forms a word with similar characters, which prevents a line break inside it. Otherwise it allows line breaks around it, except in some numeric contexts. The glyph can be confused with 8 other glyphs.
The CLDR project calls this character “nabla” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: triangle.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The nabla is a triangular symbol resembling an inverted Greek delta: or ∇. The name comes, by reason of the symbol's shape, from the Hellenistic Greek word νάβλα for a Phoenician harp, and was suggested by the encyclopedist William Robertson Smith in an 1870 letter to Peter Guthrie Tait.
The nabla symbol is available in standard HTML as ∇ and in LaTeX as
abla. In Unicode, it is the character at code point U+2207, or 8711 in decimal notation, in the Mathematical Operators block.
It is also called del.
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
8711
UTF-8
E2 88 87
UTF-16
22 07
UTF-32
00 00 22 07
URL-Quoted
%E2%88%87
HTML hex reference
∇
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
∇
HTML named entity
∇
HTML named entity
∇
alias
backward difference
alias
gradient
alias
del
Encoding: CP932 (hex bytes)
81 DE
Encoding: CP949 (hex bytes)
A1 D4
Encoding: EUC_JP (hex bytes)
A2 E0
Encoding: EUC_JIS_2004 (hex bytes)
A2 E0
Encoding: EUC_JISX0213 (hex bytes)
A2 E0
Encoding: EUC_KR (hex bytes)
A1 D4
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 36 D2 33
Encoding: ISO2022_JP (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_1 (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2 (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2004 (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_3 (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_JP_EXT (hex bytes)
1B 24 42 22 60 1B 28 42
Encoding: ISO2022_KR (hex bytes)
1B 24 29 43 0E 21 54 0F
Encoding: JOHAB (hex bytes)
D9 64
Encoding: SHIFT_JIS (hex bytes)
81 DE
Encoding: SHIFT_JIS_2004 (hex bytes)
81 DE
Encoding: SHIFT_JISX0213 (hex bytes)
81 DE
LATEX
\nabla
Adobe Glyph List
gradient
Adobe Glyph List
nabla
digraph
NB
RFC 5137
\u'2207'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u2207
C and C++
\u2207
C#
\u2207
CSS
\002207
Excel
=UNICHAR(8711)
Go
\u2207
JavaScript
\u2207
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{2207}
JSON
\u2207
Java
\u2207
Lua
\u{2207}
Matlab
char(8711)
Perl
"\x{2207}"
PHP
\u{2207}
PostgreSQL
U&'\2207'
PowerShell
`u{2207}
Python
\u2207
Ruby
\u{2207}
Rust
\u{2207}
Click the star button next to each label to set this representation as favorite or remove it from the favorites. Favorites will be shown initially. (Favorites are stored locally on your computer and never sent over the internet.)