WHITE SMILING FACE

About this character

U+263A, the white smiling face, is a typographic symbol representing a classic smiley, encoded in Unicode as part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block. Inherited from IBM’s PC codepage 437, it functioned as a pre-emoji emotional marker in early text-based computing, often indicating humor or goodwill. In contemporary use, it appears as a decorative glyph in design, a placeholder character in font testing, and a recognizable element in terminal interfaces and documentation. Programmers may encounter it in legacy character tables or as a sample for glyph rendering. Its hollow form distinguishes it from the filled variant, yet both remain enduring artifacts of digital communication’s visual vocabulary.

Copy formats

Character

Copy the literal character when you need the glyph itself:☺