How to type Black Triangle Down

Black Triangle Down is not the only name it goes by: people look for ▼ as upside down triangle too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.

▼ lives in the Geometric Shapes block (U+25A0-U+25FF), squares, circles, triangles and diamonds. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.

How to type ▼ in Excel and Google Sheets

In Excel and Google Sheets, use =UNICHAR(9660). It takes the decimal codepoint, not the hex one, and =UNICODE("▼") gives 9660 back.

What Black Triangle Down is used for

In mathematical notation ▼ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\bigblacktriangledown$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.

Unicode publishes a second list of names for ▼ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are filled down-pointing triangle and arrow. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Black Triangle Down is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.

What Unicode says about Black Triangle Down

The code chart points from ▼ to black medium down-pointing triangle (U+23F7), black medium down-pointing triangle centred (U+2BC6) and down-pointing red triangle (U+1F53B). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Black Triangle Down looks nearly right but not quite.

How Black Triangle Down behaves in software

▼ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.

What people ask about Black Triangle Down

Every way to write Black Triangle Down

Encodings and escapes for Black Triangle Down (▼)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+25BC
Decimal	9660
UTF-8 bytes	E2 96 BC
UTF-16 bytes	25 BC
HTML entity	▼
HTML numeric	▼ or ▼
CSS	\25BC
JavaScript	\u25BC
Python	\u25BC
URL-encoded	%E2%96%BC
LaTeX, in maths mode	$\bigblacktriangledown$
SVG	25BC.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If ▼ arrives as â–¼

One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 96 BC read as Windows-1252 gives exactly â–¼. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+25BC, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.