One notch smaller again, this black square renders as a color emoji automatically, no hidden character required. Despite the awkward 'medium-small' label in Unicode's own naming, it's one of the shelf's real workhorses, dropped between clauses in Japanese, Indonesian, and Arabic posts to break up a wall of text.
What ◾ means
A glossy black square, one size smaller than the ◼️ Black Medium Square, and twice smaller than the ⬛ Black Large Square. The ◾ Black Medium-Small Square is a compressed version of the mentioned emojis, hence symbolizing lesser than them too.
How and when to use it
- Black is generally associated with themes such as darkness, voids, etc. So, the less amount of black and the smaller stature of ◾ could indicate less darkness. For instance, "No matter how bright it is, there would always be dark corners ◾" or "A little shadow never harms ◾".
- A series of ◾ (◾◾◾◾◾◾) appears as a dotted line (with squared dots). Hence, you may apply this emoji for aesthetic or decorative purposes in post captions, social media profiles, or even in text messages.
- Reflecting on the first point, you may introduce ◾ even while indicating that there's less black used in the post or repost you're sharing (like a colour code).
Other Names
- ◾ Smaller Black Square
- ◾ Black Squared Dot
- ◾ Black Color
- ◾ Black Square
- ◾ Medium Small Black Square
The lowdown
- Category
- Symbols › geometric
- Codepoints
U+25FE- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.6
- Shortcodes
:black_medium_small_square:- Keywords
- black, geometric, medium-small, square
How it looks across platforms
Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — ◾ Black Medium-small Square or 🇮🇷 Flag: Iran?