U+2642 Male Sign
U+2642 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block Miscellaneous Symbols in the Basic Multilingual Plane.
This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as Mars and alchemical symbol for iron.
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+2642 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 CLDR project calls this character “male sign” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: man.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as monochrome character on conforming platforms. To enable colorful emoji display, you can combine it with Variation Selector-16: ♂️ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
A gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent sex and gender, for example in biology and medicine, in genealogy, or in the sociological fields of gender politics, LGBT subculture and identity politics.
In his books Mantissa Plantarum (1767) and Mantissa Plantarum Altera (1771), Carl Linnaeus regularly used the planetary symbols of Mars, Venus and Mercury – ♂, ♀, ☿ – for male, female and hermaphroditic (perfect) flowers, respectively. Botanists now use ⚥ for the last.
In genealogy, including kinship in anthropology and pedigrees in animal husbandry, the geometric shapes △ or □ are used for male and ○ for female. These are also used on public toilets in some countries.
The modern international pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets, 🚹︎ and 🚺︎, became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. They are sometimes abstracted to ▽ for male and △ for female.
Representations
| System | Representation |
|---|---|
| Nº | 9794 |
| UTF-8 | E2 99 82 |
| UTF-16 | 26 42 |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 26 42 |
| URL-Quoted | %E2%99%82 |
| HTML hex reference | ♂ |
| Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | ♂ |
| HTML named entity | ♂ |
| alias | Mars |
| alias | alchemical symbol for iron |
| Encoding: EUC-KR (hex bytes) | A1 CE |
| Encoding: JIS0208 (hex bytes) | A1 E9 |
| LATEX | \male |
| AGL: Latin-5 | male |
| Adobe Glyph List | male |
| Adobe Glyph List | mars |
| digraph | Ml |
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 1.1 (1993) | |
| MALE SIGN | |
| — | |
| Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs | |
| Other Symbol | |
| Common | |
| Other Neutral | |
| Not Reordered | |
| none | |
| Male Sign | |
| ✘ | |
| Male Sign | |
| Male Sign | |
| ✘ | |
| Male Sign | |
| Male Sign | |
| Male Sign | |
| Male Sign | |
| Male Sign | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| Male Sign | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| ✘ | |
| None | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Male Sign | |
| Yes | |
| Male Sign | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Male Sign | |
| None | |
| ambiguous | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic) | |
| none | |
| not a number | |
| Male Sign | |
| U |