Arrow Symbols to Copy & Paste
ASCII has no dedicated arrow glyphs — for decades people built arrows out of punctuation like -> and <-. The clean single-character arrows → ← ↑ ↓ are Unicode, and they are supported everywhere today. This page covers every direction: right, left, up, down, the four diagonals, double-line arrows, and the ASCII text arrows you can type on any keyboard.
ASCII text arrows you can type anywhere
Before Unicode arrows were reliable, everyone built arrows from ASCII punctuation, and these still work in plain-text contexts like code comments, commit messages, and terminals: -> means "right / leads to" <- means "left / assign" => a bolder right arrow (used in many programming languages) <=> means "equivalent / both directions" --> and <-- longer arrows |> and <| pointer-style arrows These are guaranteed to render on any device because they are ordinary ASCII characters.
How to type Unicode arrows on Windows and Mac
On Windows, hold Alt and type 26 on the numeric keypad for →, 27 for ←, 24 for ↑, and 25 for ↓ (these come from the legacy code page 437 set). For the diagonals and double arrows, use Character Map or copy them here. In Word, type the Unicode value such as 2192 and press Alt+X to get →. On a Mac, open the symbol viewer with Control+Command+Space and search "arrow", then double-click the direction you need. Copy-and-paste from this page is the quickest way to grab any arrow without memorizing codes.
Arrows in HTML and code
HTML has named entities for the four main arrows: → (→), ← (←), ↑ (↑), and ↓ (↓), plus ↔ for ↔. Numeric entities such as → work identically. In JavaScript or JSON, the escape \u2192 represents →. For UI affordances like carousels and dropdowns, the solid triangles ▶ ◀ ▲ ▼ often read more clearly at small sizes than thin line arrows, and they inherit the surrounding text color.