Cross Mark Button Emoji

❎ is a white X inside a rounded green square on most platforms, creating one of the most confusing emojis in Unicode: a green 'no'. It visually mirrors ✅ (white check on green square) but flips the meaning from yes to no. Originally encoded in Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the name NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK, it was renamed Cross Mark Button for Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

It sits in the Unicode Dingbats block at U+274E, descending from Hermann Zapf's 1978 ITC Zapf Dingbats, the same typeface that gave us ✔️ and ❌. The 'squared' part of the original name refers to the square frame around the character in the printed dingbat set.

Vendors handle the color differently. Apple, Google, and Samsung render ❎ with a green background, matching ✅'s treatment and producing the green-X quirk. WhatsApp and some older Android builds render ❎ red. The original Unicode name uses 'negative' to indicate the inverted fill (X in a solid square rather than on white), not the color. The result is the most visually ambiguous member of the ballot-marks family.

❎ is the quieter, UI-coded sibling of ❌. It shows up in three main places:

As a close or dismiss button. Designers who want a softer 'X' than the harsh red ❌ use ❎. Common in product release notes ('Tap ❎ to dismiss'), Slack command help, and documentation screenshots.

As a 'no' in comparison lists that don't want to shout. A ✅ ❎ comparison list feels less aggressive than a ✅ ❌ list because both sides share the green-button treatment. Accessibility-minded designers sometimes prefer it for the same reason.

As accidental confusion fuel. Because ❎ looks like ✅ at a glance (same shape, same green, different central glyph), users skimming a list often mistake it for a check. Marketers learned this the hard way and now avoid ❎ in feature lists.

In everyday texting, ❎ is rare. When people mean 'no' they type ❌. ❎ survives mostly as a UI affectation rather than a popular messaging emoji.

❎'s history starts in the same place as ❌: Hermann Zapf's 1978 ITC Zapf Dingbats, with a heavy X drawn as a rejection mark. When Unicode 1.1 imported the Dingbats block in June 1993, U+274E was assigned as 'NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK'. The 'negative' adjective referred to Zapf's reversed fill: a white X knocked out of a solid black square, the print-design equivalent of a reverse-video button.

Unicode 6.0 (2010) standardized emoji presentation. Vendors were free to choose colors. Apple and Google landed on green, matching ✅'s green-square button look, possibly to signal they were a paired yes/no pair. WhatsApp went red. Microsoft Teams went gray. The color variance that still exists across platforms dates to those 2010 to 2012 vendor decisions, never reconciled.

When Emoji 1.0 landed in 2015, Unicode renamed the glyph to 'Cross Mark Button' for clarity. The 'negative squared' language survives in the formal Unicode description and in old codepoint databases but is rarely used in everyday references now.

1. 1978ITC Zapf Dingbats ships. The 'negative' (reverse-fill) X mark is part of the 100-series.
2. 1993Unicode 1.1 (June 1993) imports the Dingbats block. U+274E NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK is assigned.
3. 2010Unicode 6.0 gives ❎ default emoji presentation. Vendors choose colors: Apple and Google pick green to mirror ✅; WhatsApp picks red; Microsoft picks gray.
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 renames the glyph from 'Negative Squared Cross Mark' to 'Cross Mark Button'. The short name stabilizes.
5. 2018[Twitter's restricted-emoji list](https://blog.emojipedia.org/why-you-cant-use-these-emojis-in-your-twitter-name/) bans ❎ from display names. Though not on the original November 5 list, it was later added because of its squared-button similarity to the verification badge.
6. 2021iOS 14.5 tweaks ❎'s shade of green to match the system green used for ✅. The two emojis now share an almost identical button background on Apple platforms.

• •❎ was originally named 'NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK' in Unicode 6.0 (2010), then renamed 'Cross Mark Button' in Emoji 1.0 (2015).
• •Apple, Google, and Samsung render ❎ with a green square background. WhatsApp and some older Android builds render it red. The vendor split dates to the original 2010 emoji font rollouts and has never been reconciled.
• •The 'negative' part of the original name refers to Zapf's reversed fill (white X on colored square), not the color. The convention comes from print-design vocabulary.
• •❎ and ✅ share the green-square button shape, which makes them nearly indistinguishable to users with red-green color blindness. Accessibility auditors cite them as the canonical 'don't rely on color alone' example.
• •❎ is one of the least-used emojis in the entire Unicode set. Google Trends shows near-zero search volume for 'green x emoji' compared to 'red x emoji' for ❌.
• •Apple's iOS Shortcuts app standardizes ❎ as the 'cancel step' iconographic marker in flow documentation, giving the emoji a small niche use in Apple's technical docs.
• •Unicode originally put ❎ in the Dingbats block (U+2700 to U+27BF) imported from ITC Zapf Dingbats in 1993, the same block that produced ✔️ ❌ and many other modern emoji.

• •❎ shows up in many older Material Design 2 mockups as a 'clear' button before Google shipped its own dismiss iconography.
• •Reddit threads about 'the weirdest emojis' consistently cite ❎ for its green-X quirk.
• •Several TikTok 'tech design critique' creators have used ❎ specifically as an example of emojis designed before usability testing was a norm.

• •❎ is U+274E. Default emoji presentation, no FE0F needed.
• •Common shortcode: :negative_squared_cross_mark::negative_squared_cross_mark: (old) or :x_button::x_button: (some platforms).
• •Avoid using ❎ and ✅ in the same UI as the only differentiator between states; color-blind users can't reliably tell them apart.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.