White Medium Square Emoji
U+25FB:white_medium_square:About White Medium Square ◻️
White Medium Square () is part of the Symbols group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.6. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with geometric, medium, square, and 1 more keywords.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
◻️ White Medium Square is a simple outlined square, mid-sized between ⬜ and ◽. On most platforms it renders as a thin dark border around an empty interior, giving it a clean, paper-like look. It doesn't have the 3D button feel of 🔲 or the flat fill of ⬜. It's the quietest of the squares, a placeholder, a bullet, an empty cell.
Unlike most emoji, ◻️ is older than the emoji standard itself. It was encoded in Unicode 3.2 in March 2002 as part of the Geometric Shapes block), long before anyone was thinking about color keyboards on phones. The block was originally built from symbols in IBM Code Page 437, the 1981 DOS character set that gave early PCs their box-drawing and shape glyphs. ◻️ was reclassified as an emoji in 2015 when Unicode formalized the emoji list.
Because it pre-dates the emoji era, ◻️ has no carrier origin and no viral moment. It's a generic shape that quietly became useful for bullet points, spacing, and text-based layouts.
◻️ is a bullet emoji. On X and Instagram it marks items in a list when writers want a cleaner look than • or ▫️. On LinkedIn it appears in skill lists and job highlights. It's also used as a placeholder for "coming soon" or "not yet filled" slots in event flyers and schedule posts.
Aesthetic bios use ◻️ as a separator: "writer ◻️ designer ◻️ london". Because it reads as empty, it works as a pause between items without drawing attention to itself. Unicode's emoji frequency data lists the whole geometric-shapes square family near the bottom of usage, but as a cohort they're reliable workhorses in formatted posts.
Nothing specific. ◻️ is a neutral medium-sized outlined square with no emotional or cultural meaning. People use it as a bullet point, a separator, a placeholder, or a visual spacer in formatted text. It doesn't flirt, doesn't joke, doesn't carry subtext.
Square emoji size ladder
The Square Family
Emoji combos
Origin story
The Geometric Shapes Unicode block was allocated in Unicode 1.0 in October 1991 but initially contained no characters. Basic square glyphs were added in Unicode 1.1 in 1993, imported from IBM's 1981 Code Page 437, the character set that shipped with the original IBM PC.
The medium-size squares came later. ◻️ and ◼️ were added in Unicode 3.2 on March 27, 2002 alongside the medium-small siblings ◽ and ◾. Unicode's official emoji-versions chart records them as "Emoji 0.6", the retroactive designation for symbols that became emoji only when the emoji standard was formalized.
None of this was done for messaging. The squares were encoded for typography, diagramming, and legacy compatibility with DOS-era applications. When Unicode Emoji 1.0 rolled out in 2015, ◻️ was quietly promoted from "symbol" to "emoji" and started showing up on phone keyboards.
Design history
- 1981The outlined and filled square glyphs that inspire the Geometric Shapes block ship in IBM Code Page 437 on the original IBM PC.
- 1991Unicode 1.0 allocates the U+25A0–U+25FF range for Geometric Shapes but assigns no characters yet.
- 1993Unicode 1.1 fills the block with 80 shape characters, including the small and medium squares.
- 2002Unicode 3.2 adds U+25FB ◻️ White Medium Square and U+25FC ◼️ Black Medium Square, closing the size gap for bullet-point typography.
- 2015Unicode Emoji 1.0 officially reclassifies ◻️ as an emoji, bringing it onto mobile emoji keyboards for the first time.
- 2019CLDR adds refined keyword annotations ("geometric", "outlined", "medium square") making ◻️ searchable by meaning rather than codepoint.
◻️ is technically U+25FB (White Medium Square) plus U+FE0F (variation selector). The selector tells the renderer to use emoji style. Older or stripped-down environments that don't process the selector show the plain U+25FB character, which is usually a thin monochrome outline.
Unicode 3.2 added U+25FB White Medium Square on March 27, 2002. It was reclassified as an emoji by Unicode Emoji 1.0 in 2015, making it available on mobile emoji keyboards.
Often confused with
⬜ White Large Square is the bigger sibling. Use ⬜ when you want a visual block (like a Wordle tile); use ◻️ when you want a bullet or spacer that doesn't dominate a line.
⬜ White Large Square is the bigger sibling. Use ⬜ when you want a visual block (like a Wordle tile); use ◻️ when you want a bullet or spacer that doesn't dominate a line.
◽ White Medium-Small Square is slightly smaller than ◻️. The difference is subtle but real. On iOS they're easy to tell apart; on Android the distinction is sometimes nearly invisible.
◽ White Medium-Small Square is slightly smaller than ◻️. The difference is subtle but real. On iOS they're easy to tell apart; on Android the distinction is sometimes nearly invisible.
🔲 Black Square Button has a thick 3D-looking border and implies a UI element. ◻️ is flat and plain, more like a paper checkbox. Use 🔲 for interface mockups, ◻️ for generic bullets.
🔲 Black Square Button has a thick 3D-looking border and implies a UI element. ◻️ is flat and plain, more like a paper checkbox. Use 🔲 for interface mockups, ◻️ for generic bullets.
□ (U+25A1) is the plain-text White Square, the monochrome ancestor. ◻️ adds the U+FE0F variation selector to force emoji-style display on platforms that support it. Without it, ◻ often renders as thin text.
□ (U+25A1) is the plain-text White Square, the monochrome ancestor. ◻️ adds the U+FE0F variation selector to force emoji-style display on platforms that support it. Without it, ◻ often renders as thin text.
Size. ⬜ White Large Square is roughly twice as visually heavy as ◻️. ⬜ works as a block or tile (famously, Wordle's unused-row marker). ◻️ works as a bullet or separator in running text.
Caption ideas
Fun facts
- •The Geometric Shapes block contains 96 characters, of which only the six squares and a handful of circles and triangles are classified as emoji.
- •◻️ was standardized in Unicode 3.2 on March 27, 2002, the same release that added the euro sign category update and CJK Extension B.
- •The IBM Code Page 437 that inspired Geometric Shapes also provided the original smiley face characters at code points 0x01 and 0x02, arguably the ancestors of all emoji.
- •◻️ renders almost identically across Apple, Google Noto, Microsoft Fluent and Samsung. The design has barely evolved since 2015.
- •The middle-size gap in the square family was filled by ◻️ (medium) and ◽ (medium-small) because typographers kept complaining that ⬜ was too big and ▫️ was too small for running text.
- •In LaTeX, the same shape is . In HTML, the entity is plus for the emoji selector.
- •◻️ appears in the CLDR keyword set with "geometric", "square" and "white" as its only annotations.
In pop culture
- •Text-based chess notation: ◻️ and ◼️ have been used for decades in plain-text chess boards and checkers games, long before emoji keyboards existed.
- •LinkedIn minimalist bios: ◻️ became a popular separator in professional bios around 2018–2020 as the platform's typography-lite aesthetic took hold.
- •Aesthetic Twitter bios: ◻️ is a staple of the minimalist-bio trend, used as a subtle divider between interests ("coffee ◻️ code ◻️ cats").
Trivia
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