U+2196 NORTH WEST ARROW

The Unicode character U+2196, officially named NORTH WEST ARROW, was introduced in Unicode version 1.1. It is part of the Arrows block, which belongs to the Basic Multilingual plane. Previously, it was also referred to as UPPER LEFT ARROW.

Categorized technically as a Other Symbol, this character typically falls under the Common script. In terms of text layout and rendering, the glyph is not a composition and has ambiguous in East Asian typography. When placed in bidirectional text, it behaves as an Other Neutral character. Its visual representation remains not mirrored regardless of the reading direction.

As an officially designated emoji, this character can be displayed in colorful graphical formats on supported platforms. To explicitly request the colorful emoji presentation rather than a standard monochrome text symbol, developers can append the Variation Selector-16 (U+FE0F) directly after the character.