Home: go to the homepage U+2600 to U+26FF Miscellaneous Symbols
Glyph for U+263B
Source: Noto Sans Math

U+263B Black Smiling Face

U+263B was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block U+2600 to U+26FF Miscellaneous Symbols in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

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. U+263B offers a line break opportunity at its position, except in some numeric contexts.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

A smiley, sometimes called a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing a smiling face. Since the 1950s, it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line representing eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs in the 1950s emerged, with noses, eyebrows, and outlines. New York radio station WMCA used a yellow and black design for its "Good Guys" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and Franklin Loufrani in 1971. Today, The Smiley Company founded by Franklin Loufrani claims to hold the rights to the smiley face in over 100 countries. It has become one of the top 100 licensing companies globally.

There was a smile fad in 1971 in the United States. The Associated Press (AP) ran a wirephoto showing Joy P. Young and Harvey Ball holding the designed of the smiley and reported on September 11, 1971 that "two affiliated insurance companies" claimed credit for the symbol and Harvey Ball designed it; Bernard and Murray Spain claimed credit for introducing it to the market. In October 1971 Loufrani trademarked his design in France while working as a journalist for the French newspaper France Soir.

Today, the smiley face has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. The internet smiley began with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s when he first theorized ASCII characters could be used to create faces and demonstrate emotion in text. Since then, Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms known as emoticons. They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design.

Representations

System Representation
9787
UTF-8 E2 98 BB
UTF-16 26 3B
UTF-32 00 00 26 3B
URL-Quoted %E2%98%BB
HTML hex reference ☻
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ☻
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) 81 37 A8 33
AGL: Latin-5 invsmileface
Adobe Glyph List blacksmilingface
Adobe Glyph List invsmileface
digraph 0U

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na) BLACK SMILING FACE
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
General Category (gc) Other Symbol
Script (sc) Common
Bidirectional Category (bc) Other Neutral
Combining Class (ccc) Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt) none
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
Alphabetic (Alpha)
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
Composition Exclusion (CE)
Case Ignorable (CI)
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
Cased (Cased)
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
Dash (Dash)
Deprecated (Dep)
Diacritic (Dia)
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
Emoji Component (EComp)
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
Emoji (Emoji)
Extender (Ext)
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
Hex Digit (Hex)
Hyphen (Hyphen)
ID Continue (IDC)
ID Start (IDS)
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
IDSU (IDSU) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start) 0
Ideographic (Ideo)
InCB (InCB) None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
Indic Positional Category (InPC) NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC) Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
Join Control (Join_C)
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
Modifier Combining Mark (MCM)
Math (Math)
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC) Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC) Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
Other ID Start (OIDS)
Other Lowercase (OLower)
Other Math (OMath)
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
Quotation Mark (QMark)
Regional Indicator (RI)
Radical (Radical)
Sentence Break (SB) Other
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Other
White Space (WSpace)
XID Continue (XIDC)
XID Start (XIDS)
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt) Non Joining
Line Break (lb) Ideographic
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+263B Black Smiling Face
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo) U