Hand Symbols

Two families of hand: the pointing manicules ☜ ☞ ☚ ☛, which render as plain text at your font size, and the gesture emoji 👍 ✌ 🙏 🤝, which arrive in colour. Take a manicule when the hand sits inside a line of writing, an emoji when the gesture is the message.

Copy and Paste Hand Symbols

Hands split cleanly in two here. ☜ ☞ ☚ ☛ ☝ ☟ are text characters — they take your font, your colour and your size, and they sit inside a sentence without breaking the line. Everything from 👍 onward is emoji: drawn by the platform, always in colour, always the same size. Which you want depends on whether the hand is punctuation or the point.

What Are Hand Symbols?

The pointing hands are the oldest thing on this page by centuries. ☞ is a manicule — the little hand printers and scribes drew in the margin to mean "look here". It ran in books from the twelfth century onward, long before it became a Unicode character, and it still reads exactly that way in a modern document.

The gesture emoji came from a different direction entirely: Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, standardised into Unicode from 2010. That is why ☞ is a black-and-white printer's mark and 👉 is a coloured cartoon of the same idea — they were designed a very long way apart.

How to Use Hand Symbols

Hand Symbols in Plain Text

☞ works as a pointer in a document, a README or a chat message, and because it is an ordinary character it survives being pasted anywhere text goes. ☚ ☛ are the filled versions, ☜ ☞ the outlined ones. The page also carries ☝︎ ✌︎ ✍︎ — the same characters as ☝ ✌ ✍ but with an invisible marker attached that asks for the plain-text drawing rather than the colour emoji, because many platforms show the bare character as an emoji anyway.

Typing Hand Symbols on a Keyboard

None of these has a short Windows Alt code. A sweep of both the DOS and Windows character sets returns nothing, because every hand character was encoded well after those tables were fixed. The full value works — Alt and 9758 for ☞, 9756 for ☜ — and in Word you can type 261E then Alt+X. On a phone the emoji keyboard covers the coloured ones and nothing covers the manicules, which is why copying is the practical route.

Hand Symbols and Skin Tone

Most gesture emoji accept a skin-tone modifier, which is a second character appended to the first. The grid above shows the base forms; your keyboard or emoji picker is where the tones get applied. The pointing manicules have no tones at all — they are line art, not people.

Types of Hand Symbols

Pointing Hand Symbols

☜ ☝ ☞ ☟ are the outlined manicules pointing left, up, right and down; ☚ ☛ are the filled left and right pair. 🖗 points down and left. In emoji, 👈 👉 👆 👇 do the same job in colour, and 🫵 points at the reader.

Approval and Greeting Hand Symbols

👍 and 👎 are thumbs up and down, 👌 is the OK hand, 👏 clapping, 👋 waving, 🤝 a handshake. 🙌 is raising hands and 🙋 a person raising one — the closest thing to a high five, of which more below. 🖒 🖓 🖏 🖔 are the reversed, non-emoji versions of thumbs up, thumbs down, OK and victory.

Gesture Hand Symbols and Their Meanings

Several of these carry a specific, documented meaning rather than a general one. 🤟 is the love-you gesture from American Sign Language. 🖖 is the Vulcan salute from Star Trek. 🤘 is the sign of the horns. 🤙 is the shaka, from Hawaii. 🤞 is crossed fingers for luck, 🤌 the pinched-fingers gesture associated with Italian speech, and 🫶 is heart hands.

Worth knowing before you send one: a few hand gestures read very differently in different places. 👍 is straightforwardly positive in most of the world and rude in parts of the Middle East and West Africa. 👌 means "fine" almost everywhere, but has also been adopted as an extremist sign in some online contexts — the Anti-Defamation League lists it for that reason while noting the meaning depends entirely on context. Neither is a reason to avoid them; both are a reason to think about the audience.

Prayer and Thanks Hand Symbols

🙏 is formally named Folded Hands. It is read as prayer in most Western use and as "please" or "thank you" in Japanese use, which is where the design came from — the two readings coexist rather than one being wrong. 🤲 is palms up together, used for supplication and for offering.

Fist and Strength Hand Symbols

✊ is a raised fist, 👊 an oncoming one, 🤛 🤜 the left and right facing pair used for a fist bump, and 💪 a flexed bicep.

Best Uses for Hand Symbols

Hand Symbols in Documents and Lists

A manicule is a better pointer than an arrow when you want the reader's eye rather than a direction: ☞ beside a line reads as "this one" in a way a plain arrow does not. It also stays black in a printed document where an emoji would come out as a grey box or a colour you did not choose.

Hand Symbols in Messages and Bios

The gesture emoji are the point in a message — that is the register they belong to. In a bio or a username the text hands often work better, because some platforms strip emoji from display names and none of them strip ☞.

Hand Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The formal names describe the drawing: ☞ is U+261E White Right Pointing Index, ☛ U+261B Black Right Pointing Index, ✌ U+270C Victory Hand, 🙏 U+1F64F Folded Hands, 🫶 U+1FAF6 Heart Hands. "White" and "black" mean outlined and filled, as they do throughout Unicode, and have nothing to do with colour.

The manicules sit low, from U+261A to U+261F, which is why they are supported by essentially every font. The newest gestures — 🫰 🫱 🫲 🫳 🫴 🫵 🫶 🫷 🫸 — are above U+1FAF0 and are the ones most likely to appear as an empty box on an older device.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hand Symbols

Is there a high five emoji?

No. Unicode has no high-five character — a scan of every name in the standard returns nothing. What people use instead is 🙌 raising hands, or 🤝 for the handshake sense. 🙏 is often read as a high five too, though it was designed as folded hands.

What is the difference between ☞ and 👉?

☞ is a text character: it takes your font's colour and size and sits on the line like a letter. 👉 is an emoji, drawn by the platform in colour at a fixed size, and it looks different on Android, iOS and Windows. Use ☞ where the hand must match the surrounding text.

What does 🙏 mean?

Formally it is Folded Hands. In most Western use it reads as prayer or as a plea; in Japanese use, which is where the design originated, it reads as "please" or "thank you". Both readings are current, so context does the work.

How do I type a hand symbol without copying it?

Every hand character was encoded too late to get one. On Windows use the full value — Alt and 9758 for ☞, 9756 for ☜ — or type 261E and press Alt+X in Word. On a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+Space; on Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then 261E.

Why does a hand symbol show in colour when I wanted plain text?

Some platforms render ☝, ✌ and ✍ as emoji even though they are text characters by default. The versions listed as text style — ☝︎ ✌︎ ✍︎ — carry an invisible marker that asks for the plain drawing, and they are the ones to take if the hand must stay monochrome.

What is the hand pointing symbol called?

A manicule, from the Latin for "little hand". Printers also called it an index, a fist or a digit. It was a margin mark meaning "note this" for several hundred years before Unicode encoded it as ☞.

Related Collections for Hand Symbols

For pointing without a hand, see arrow symbols. 🫶 makes a heart, and the rest of those are on the heart symbols page. Faces that involve a hand — a facepalm, a hand over the mouth — belong with the smiley face symbols. Everything else is indexed at symbol collections.