Upwards Button Emoji

The upwards button (🔼) is a red triangle framed inside a square, pointing up. The square frame is what gives it away as a button and not just a direction. Where ⬆️ is a flat arrow for "this way," 🔼 looks tappable: volume up, scroll to top, upvote, next page. That raised-button feel is why it ends up in UI imitations whenever the context is an interface rather than a movement. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the original name UP-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE, and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

In texting, 🔼 handles three jobs at once. It's the "pay attention, look above" marker (often paired with 👀 to point at the previous message). It's the upvote stand-in on platforms that don't give you a real one. And it's the generic "increase" emoji, a lightweight version of 📈 when you don't need the chart, just the direction.

🔼 shows up in three distinct social habits. First, the "look up there" pointer: people reply to a message with just 🔼 or 🔼🔼🔼 to emphasize what was said above. Second, the upvote proxy: platforms like Twitter/X, Discord, and Instagram don't have native upvotes, so 🔼 became shorthand for "I'd upvote this." Reddit's actual upvote icon is a custom arrow that's visually close to 🔼, which reinforced the association. Third, the "level up" or "increase" signal: 🔼 pairs with gaming, stats, career wins, or any metric going up. It's less common than ⬆️ in creator captions because ⬆️ is more universally legible, but 🔼 wins when the vibe is specifically interface or button-shaped. Twitter has experimented with Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons since 2021, which has kept 🔼's upvote-proxy use quietly relevant.

🔼 was encoded alongside 🔽 🔺 🔻 in Unicode 6.0 to preserve a Japanese carrier convention. Early 2000s Japanese mobile keyboards used two flavors of red triangle: bordered (for UI button stand-ins) and unbordered (for stock/weather tickers). Unicode kept both. The bordered 🔼 🔽 pair was meant to feel like a physical button on an old remote control or microwave, the kind with a plastic plus-minus rocker.

The original Unicode names all carried the word RED, reflecting Japanese carrier art. But nothing in Unicode requires a specific color, and as emoji spread beyond Japan, vendors started rendering 🔼 in whatever matched their system chrome. Microsoft shipped a gray version across Windows 10 and 11. Some earlier sets went blue. Apple stuck with red. In 2017 Unicode gave up and renamed the emoji to just "Upwards Button," matching how the glyph was actually being drawn.

Encoded in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F53C with the original name UP-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE. Lives in the User Interface Symbols subblock of Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Unicode renamed it to "Upwards Button" in 2017 after vendors like Microsoft had already shipped gray versions instead of red.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as UP-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE.↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, available across keyboards as 🔼.
3. 2016Microsoft ships a gray version in Windows 10 Anniversary Update's emoji refresh.↗
4. 2017Unicode drops "red" from the name, officially calling it "Upwards Button."
5. 2021Twitter begins testing Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons that look almost identical to 🔼 and 🔽.↗

• •Before 2017, 🔼's official Unicode name was UP-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE. The "red" was retired because Microsoft and other vendors had been shipping it gray for years.
• •Twitter started testing Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons in 2021. The upvote icon looks nearly identical to 🔼, which is why the emoji remains a handy stand-in for "I'd upvote this."
• •🔼 belongs to the User Interface Symbols subblock of Unicode. It's one of a small handful of emoji filed explicitly as UI rather than pictograph.
• •Reply with just 🔼 and nothing else: it's internet shorthand for "what the person above said." Two or three in a row means "really strongly what they said."
• •In old Japanese carrier emoji sets, 🔼 was the "volume up" button on mobile UIs, which is where the volume-control association in texting comes from.