Trackball Emoji

A trackball: a stationary input device with a ball you roll with your fingers or thumb to move a cursor. Emojipedia describes it as "a ball in a housing," most often rendered as a gray or silver sphere sitting in a squat black or dark base. Apple, Google, and Samsung all draw it as a squarish block with a colored ball on top, a design that looks more like a 1990s Kensington TurboMouse than anything shipping in 2026.

The trackball is older than the mouse. Ralph Benjamin built the first one in 1946 for the British Royal Navy, then Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff, and Kenyon Taylor at Ferranti Canada built a public version in 1952 for the DATAR anti-submarine warfare system. They used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball as the roller. Douglas Engelbart's mouse wouldn't ship for another 16 years.

As an emoji, 🖲️ is one of Unicode's least-used characters. It was approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) alongside the mouse (🖱️), keyboard shortcuts, and a bunch of other "technical" pictographs from the Wingdings batch. The raw emoji character barely registers on Google Trends. When it shows up, it's almost always on Reddit's r/Trackballs, in accessibility discussions, or in the occasional tweet about a Logitech MX Ergo.

🖲️ is a hobbyist emoji. It appears in three specific places: the mechanical keyboard adjacent trackball scene (Reddit, Discord, custom QMK builds like the Ploopy Adept), accessibility and ergonomics content, and the occasional retro computing post on Mastodon or Bluesky. You won't see it on TikTok. You won't see it in group chats.

The community that uses it is small but loud. Trackball users tend to evangelize. The MX Ergo and Kensington Expert Mouse subreddits are full of converts who spent their first month with the device wondering if they'd made a mistake, then never went back. Logitech has a case study certified by United States Ergonomics claiming the 20-degree tilt plate cuts forearm strain by 27%. Kensington has been building trackballs since the 1989 TurboMouse. The hobby is old, quiet, and deeply loyal.

Corporate and brand usage of 🖲️ is basically zero. Logitech and Kensington don't use the emoji in marketing because the Apple design looks like neither of their products. Everyone just types the word "trackball" and moves on.

The trackball was invented twice, both times in secret. The first one was Ralph Benjamin's 1946 "roller ball", built for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service as part of a post-war radar plotting system. It was a metal ball on two rubber-coated wheels, and the military classified it, so almost nobody knew it existed.

Six years later, engineers at Ferranti Canada saw Benjamin's work and decided they needed one for DATAR, the Royal Canadian Navy's anti-submarine warfare system. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff, and Kenyon Taylor designed their version around an air-bearings system in 1952. For the rolling sphere, they used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. Five-pin is a smaller Canadian variant of bowling with a ball about 5 inches across, small enough to palm. DATAR was demonstrated in the fall of 1953 and worked. It was also classified.

Because DATAR was secret, Ferranti never patented the trackball. The idea sat in military archives while Douglas Engelbart built the first mouse in 1964 and filed the patent that made him (not quite) famous. The trackball didn't reach consumer computing until the 1980s, mostly through Atari arcade cabinets. By the time Kensington launched the TurboMouse in 1989, the world had decided mice were the default and trackballs were weird.

The 🖲️ emoji arrived in Unicode 7.0 in June 2014, paired with 🖱️. Both came from the Wingdings-era technical symbols that Unicode absorbed when it folded the Wingdings and Webdings fonts into the main character set.

1. 1946Ralph Benjamin builds the first trackball, a classified Royal Navy prototype↗
2. 1952Ferranti Canada's DATAR team uses a Canadian five-pin bowling ball as the first public trackball↗
3. 1980Atari ships Centipede and Missile Command with trackball controls, popularizing the device in arcades↗
4. 1984Marble Madness uses a trackball as its primary input, one of the first video games built around rolling a ball
5. 1989Kensington releases the TurboMouse, establishing the desktop trackball form factor↗
6. 1990Golden Tee Golf launches in arcades, eventually becoming the most-played trackball game in history
7. 1996Kensington Expert Mouse becomes the defining desktop trackball design
8. 2006BlackBerry Pearl 8100 ships with a tiny white LED-lit trackball under the screen↗
9. 2014🖲️ approved in Unicode 7.0 as U+1F5B2 TRACKBALL↗
10. 2017Logitech launches the MX Ergo, the first mainstream tilt-plate trackball
11. 2024Logitech MX Ergo S ships with 80% quieter clicks and ergonomist certification↗

• •The trackball was invented 18 years before the mouse. Ralph Benjamin's 1946 prototype predates Douglas Engelbart's 1964 mouse, but because Benjamin's version was a military secret, almost nobody knew it existed.
• •The DATAR system (1952) used an actual Canadian five-pin bowling ball as its trackball. The ball was suspended on an air-bearings system and tracked by two rollers. It remains one of the most charmingly improvised pieces of military hardware ever built.
• •The trackball mouse market was worth $864M in 2025 and is growing at 6.88% CAGR. The device that was supposed to die in 1990 is quietly larger than, for example, the entire vinyl record industry.
• •The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (2006) had a 4mm backlit trackball whose LED color could be changed by software. For about 4 years this was the most-touched trackball in the world. The iPhone killed it.
• •Golden Tee Golf uses a 3-inch trackball in every arcade cabinet. The game has been running continuously in American bars since 1990 and is still being updated in 2026. It's probably logged more human thumb-hours than every desktop trackball combined.
• •Apple, Google, and Samsung all render 🖲️ as a squarish base with a colored ball, mimicking the Kensington TurboMouse from 1989. None of them look like the Logitech MX Ergo or any modern trackball, which is why no brand uses the emoji in marketing.
• •The Ploopy Adept, released in 2022, is a fully 3D-printable open-source trackball with QMK firmware. It ships as a kit of PCBs and printed shells. The mechanical keyboard subculture absorbed it instantly.
• •Trackballs are standard accessibility hardware. AbleNet's BIGtrack is a 3-inch yellow ball used in special education and adaptive computing, operable by elbow, foot, or mouth stick.

• •Atari's Centipede (1980) and Missile Command (1980) made the trackball a defining arcade input. A generation of Gen X and older Millennials associate trackballs less with computing and more with quarter-fed pixel shooters.
• •Marble Madness (1984) used the trackball as its core mechanic. You weren't moving a cursor, you were rolling a marble through a 3D isometric course. It remains one of the few games designed FROM the trackball rather than just accepting one.
• •Golden Tee Golf (1990, still in bars today) is probably the most commercially successful trackball application ever shipped. The 3-inch ball in a bar-room cabinet has logged more human thumb-hours than every Kensington Expert Mouse combined.
• •The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (2006) put a 4mm translucent trackball into millions of pockets. When RIM replaced it with a touch-capacitive trackpad in 2010, it signaled the end of BlackBerry's physical-input identity.

• •🖲️ is U+1F5B2U+1F5B2 TRACKBALL + U+FE0FU+FE0F variation selector for emoji presentation.
• •Discord/Slack/GitHub: :trackball::trackball:. Not widely supported in older emoji pickers because the character is so rarely used.
• •Paired sibling: 🖱️ U+1F5B1U+1F5B1 COMPUTER MOUSE. Both were added in Unicode 7.0 (2014) from the Wingdings/Webdings technical-symbol import batch.

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