This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as thunder and lightning symbol.
The glyph is not a composition. Its East Asian Width is wide. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+26A1 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The CLDR project calls this character “high voltage” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: danger, electric, lightning, voltage, zap.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as colorful emoji on conforming platforms. To reduce it to a monochrome character, you can combine it with Variation Selector-15: ⚡︎ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
A thunderbolt or lightning bolt is a symbolic representation of lightning when accompanied by a loud thunderclap. In Indo-European mythology, the thunderbolt was identified with the 'Sky Father'; this association is also found in later Hellenic representations of Zeus and Vedic descriptions of the vajra wielded by the god Indra. It may have been a symbol of cosmic order, as expressed in the fragment from Heraclitus describing "the Thunderbolt that steers the course of all things".
In its original usage the word may also have been a description of the consequences of a close approach between two planetary cosmic bodies, as Plato suggested in Timaeus, or, according to Victor Clube, meteors, though this is not currently the case. As a divine manifestation the thunderbolt has been a powerful symbol throughout history, and has appeared in many mythologies. Drawing from this powerful association, the thunderbolt is often found in military symbolism and semiotic representations of electricity.