Arrow Symbol (→ ← ↑ ↓): Copy and Paste
Every arrow sorted by direction and by style. Plus a distinction that matters: the text arrow and the emoji arrow are not the same character and do not behave alike.
Tap an arrow to copy it
All of these are text symbols: they inherit the colour and size of the letters around them.
Simple arrows
The core block, present in any typeface.
Double and mathematical
In mathematics these carry meanings of their own: ⇒ is “implies” and ⇔ is “if and only if”.
Decorative
From the dingbats block. Heavier, but with weaker font coverage.
What is the arrow symbol?
The arrow symbol (→) is a Unicode character from the Arrows block, which occupies the range U+2190 to U+21FF. The rightwards arrow is U+2192; the leftwards one is U+2190.
That block gathers more than a hundred variants, and its ordering is not arbitrary: it opens with the four cardinal directions, continues with the diagonals, then the doubles, then the dashed and squiggly ones. The thicker, more decorative arrows — ➜, ➤, ➥ — live in an entirely different neighbourhood, the dingbats, which Unicode inherited from a symbol typeface of the 1980s.
That dual ancestry explains a very practical difference. Arrows from the original block are in virtually every font, whereas the decorative ones depend on the installed typeface including them. When an arrow shows up as an empty rectangle, it is almost always one of the latter.
It also explains why the two families never quite match. A ➜ pasted next to a → looks like a mistake, because they were drawn by different hands for different purposes, with different stroke weights and different vertical positions relative to the baseline. Pick one family per document and stay in it.
The text arrow and the emoji arrow
You copy an arrow, paste it on your phone and it comes out as a huge blue emoji. Or the other way round: you copy one from the emoji keyboard, paste it into a document, and it turns up thin and black. Neither is a bug — there are two different characters behind what looks like the same drawing:
| What you see | Code points | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| → | U+2192 | Text arrowInherits the colour of your letters |
| ➡ | U+27A1 | Wide dingbatStill a text symbol, just heavier |
| ➡️ | U+27A1 U+FE0F | Emoji arrowWith a variation selector |
The third row is the key one: the emoji arrow is not one character, it is two. The symbol U+27A1 has the variation selector U+FE0F stuck behind it, an invisible character that asks the system for the colour version. If that companion is lost along the way — passing through an editor that filters it, saving to a format that does not preserve it — the arrow reverts to being drawn as plain black text.
The invisible half also explains behaviour that feels haunted. Your cursor needs two presses to step past the arrow. A character counter reports one more than you expected. A search for the arrow you can see returns nothing, because you typed the bare symbol and the document holds the two-character version. Nothing is broken; there is simply a character you cannot see.
For documents, tables and anything that gets printed, the text arrow → is always the sensible option: it weighs a single character, adapts to the colour and size of the surrounding type, and does not depend on which emoji set the reader has installed.
→ and ⇒ do not mean the same thing
Outside mathematics people swap them freely, but inside it each has its own job, and confusing them changes what the sentence says:
- → (U+2192) — a map or a transformation. f: A → B reads “f goes from A to B”. In limits, x → 0 is “x tends to zero”.
- ⇒ (U+21D2) — logical implication. A ⇒ B means that if A is true, so is B. It says nothing about the converse.
- ⇔ (U+21D4) — equivalence, “if and only if”. The two propositions imply one another.
- ↦ (U+21A6) — the barred arrow, which assigns individual elements: x ↦ x² reads “x maps to x squared”. It is a different character from the one declaring the domain and codomain, and the distinction is deliberate: the first arrow describes the function, the second describes what it does to a point.
There is a related habit worth avoiding in prose. Writing “A → B” in a sentence to mean “A leads to B” is fine in notes and slides, but in running text it reads as jargon and, worse, invites the reader to wonder which of the four meanings above you intended. Spell it out when precision matters.
In ordinary English writing, the single arrow with spaces on either side is the standard convention for sequences and menu paths: “File → Export → PDF”. Keep the same arrow style throughout — mixing → and ➜ on one page is immediately noticeable, because the dingbat is visibly heavier than the text arrow beside it.
The arrows of chemical reactions
A handful of arrows appear only in chemistry, and anyone writing an equation ends up needing them sooner or later. The usual mistake is reaching for the double ⇔ to mean equilibrium, when the correct character is something else entirely:
| Arrow | Code point | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|
| → | U+2192 | A reaction that runs in one direction only |
| ⇌ | U+21CC | Chemical equilibrium: it runs both ways at once |
| ⇀ | U+21C0 | A half arrow, or harpoon: one direction on its own |
| ↑ | U+2191 | The product is given off as a gas |
| ↓ | U+2193 | The product precipitates out |
The equilibrium arrow ⇌ is built from two harpoons, not from two complete arrowheads: each half-barb stands for one of the two directions the reaction runs in. That is exactly why it is not interchangeable with the logical double ⇔, which means equivalence between propositions and, in a chemical equation, is simply wrong.
The vertical arrows ↑ and ↓ take on a use here that has nothing to do with direction: placed after a product, they mean it leaves the solution — upwards as a gas, downwards as a precipitate. They are the same characters as in the first grid; only the context changes. Textbooks vary on whether the arrow goes immediately after the formula or after the state symbol, so follow whatever convention your course or journal uses.
How to type an arrow on each system
The Alt codes for arrows are among the few that are still short — a leftover from MS-DOS.
Windows
Alt + 26 gives →; Alt + 27 gives ←, Alt + 24 up and Alt + 25 down.
Short codes inherited from MS-DOS, with no leading zeros.
macOS
Character viewer, “Arrows” category.
No direct shortcut; the viewer has the whole block.
Linux
With the Compose key: hyphen then greater-than.
Also Ctrl + Shift + U followed by 2192.
LaTeX & Word
In equations: \to, and \Rightarrow for the double one.
In Word, type 2192 then press Alt + X.
HTML
← ↑ ↓ for the other directions.
The double one is ⇒, with a capital R.
Autocorrect
Word and many editors turn --> into → as you type.
Convenient, but worth knowing it changes the character.
A warning about autocorrect: when Word turns --> into →, what is stored in the file stops being three ASCII characters and becomes a single one, U+2192. That is usually what you wanted, but it is worth knowing if the text is going to end up in a system that only accepts ASCII, or in a source code file where --> was meant to stay exactly as typed.
Frequently asked questions
How do I type an arrow on my keyboard?
What is the Unicode code for the arrow?
What is the difference between → and ➡️?
When do I use ⇒ instead of →?
How do I write an arrow in a menu path?
Do arrows look the same on every device?
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