Unicode is the standard decided upon by the computing industry for representing text in almost all of the world’s writing systems. So far, it contains well over one hundred thousand characters, and it’s still growing.
But one little subset of Unicode completely fascinates me, because it has a particular kind of resonance. That is the set of 112 Unicode identifiers reserved for arrows. How they decided that 112 was the right number is a bit of a mystery to me, but I do know the Unicode committees like to organize things into multiples of sixteen, since that makes for nice hexadecimal divisions. I guess somehow they decided that six groups of sixteen were not quite enough, eight were too many, and seven were just right.
Anyway, here they are, in all their pointed glory:
←
| ↑
| →
| ↓
| ↔
| ↕
| ↖
| ↗
| ↘
| ↙
| ↚
| ↛
| ↜
| ↝
| ↞
| ↟
| ↠
| ↡
| ↢
| ↣
| ↤
| ↥
| ↦
| ↧
| ↨
| ↩
| ↪
| ↫
| ↬
| ↭
| ↮
| ↯
| ↰
| ↱
| ↲
| ↳
| ↴
| ↵
| ↶
| ↷
| ↸
| ↹
| ↺
| ↻
| ↼
| ↽
| ↾
| ↿
| ⇀
| ⇁
| ⇂
| ⇃
| ⇄
| ⇅
| ⇆
| ⇇
| ⇈
| ⇉
| ⇊
| ⇋
| ⇌
| ⇍
| ⇎
| ⇏
| ⇐
| ⇑
| ⇒
| ⇓
| ⇔
| ⇕
| ⇖
| ⇗
| ⇘
| ⇙
| ⇚
| ⇛
| ⇜
| ⇝
| ⇞
| ⇟
| ⇠
| ⇡
| ⇢
| ⇣
| ⇤
| ⇥
| ⇦
| ⇧
| ⇨
| ⇩
| ⇪
| ⇫
| ⇬
| ⇭
| ⇮
| ⇯
| ⇰
| ⇱
| ⇲
| ⇳
| ⇴
| ⇵
| ⇶
| ⇷
| ⇸
| ⇹
| ⇺
| ⇻
| ⇼
| ⇽
| ⇾
| ⇿ | |
|---|
What I love about this set of shapes is that it represents all sorts of ways that one thing can relate to another, without saying anything at all about what those things might be. You can take this as a vocabulary for relating power relationships, or political affiliations, or perhaps types of love.
In fact, simply looking at some of these arrows suggests ideas about how things could relate to each other. One can imagine, say, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince penning an album of songs with some of these evocative symbols as titles. For example, the rightmost arrow in the fourth row could be interpreted as meaning, roughly, “Nothing compares 2 U”.
You might want to try your hand at mapping these suggestively sagittate glyphs into some meaning structure near and dear to your heart, whether it be battles of the American Civil War, concepts of quantum physics, or the daimonica in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.