The ↘ (South East Arrow) Symbol: Meaning, Usage, and Unicode Guide
The ↘ (South East Arrow) symbol is a standard Unicode character that points diagonally downward and to the right. Officially named "South East Arrow" by the Unicode Consortium, it represents a direction towards the lower-right quadrant of a two-dimensional space. You will frequently see it used in digital navigation, user interface design, and typography to direct a reader's attention to a specific area below and to the right of the current text.
Added to the standard in 1993 with Unicode 1.1, the ↘ symbol lives in the "Arrows" block under the code point U+2198. Arrows are among the oldest typographic symbols, evolving from literal representations of drawn bow-and-arrows to abstract lines indicating movement, flow, and direction. The South East arrow is part of a complete set of eight directional arrows that cover the primary compass points, ensuring digital text can indicate any basic trajectory.
This diagonal arrow plays a versatile role across several disciplines. In mathematics and physics, it can indicate a limit approached from a specific direction, denote decreasing values, or represent specific vector fields and matrices. In user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, the ↘ symbol commonly indicates resizing a window from the top-left corner downwards, or it acts as a visual cue to interact with an element in the bottom-right corner of a screen. On social media and messaging platforms, users drop the ↘ symbol to point directly at a link, image, or comment located below their text. It also occasionally serves as a visual shorthand for a downward trend, similar to a declining line graph.
Typing the ↘ symbol is straightforward once you know the right shortcuts. On Windows, you can use the Alt code by holding down the Alt key and typing 8600 on your numeric keypad. Mac users can easily access it through the Character Viewer by pressing Control + Command + Space and searching for "south east" or "arrow". For web developers and programmers, the HTML entity `↘` or the decimal code `↘` will render the symbol perfectly on any webpage, while the CSS escape code is `\2198`.
The South East Arrow is closely related to its exact opposite, the ↖ (North West Arrow), which points up and to the left. It also pairs contextually with the ↗ (North East Arrow) and ↙ (South West Arrow) to complete the diagonal directions. While standard vertical and horizontal arrows like ↓ (Down Arrow) and → (Right Arrow) handle straight movements, the ↘ symbol provides the essential nuance needed for diagonal trajectories and corner-to-corner navigation.