AsciiArrows.org is a free collection of ASCII arrows. Kind of makes sense, right? You’ll find many kinds of right, left, up, and down ASCII arrows here.
The grid above lists all the ASCII arrows. Click any one to copy it straight to your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere.
To narrow things down, browse by direction from the top navigation menu, or type a search term into the search box.
The Settings button in the top-right corner allows you to turn the description under each character on or off, as well as edit other display options.
An ASCII arrow is typically not a single character. It is a small picture built from ordinary keyboard
characters: a hyphen and a greater-than sign make ->, a caret stands in for an up arrow, and a
lowercase v does duty as a down arrow. Because every piece is a plain character, an ASCII arrow
renders correctly anywhere text does, with no font or encoding surprises.
There’s a nice historical wrinkle here. The original 1963 version of ASCII really did include an up
arrow and a left arrow, at the code points now occupied by ^ and _. The 1967 revision
replaced them with the caret and the underscore, and the arrows have been drawn by hand ever since.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a character encoding standard developed in the 1960s for use with computers.
It’s a 7-bit encoding, so it covers 128 characters in total: uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation, and a set of control characters. That small, universally supported repertoire is exactly why ASCII arrows still work everywhere.
If these pure ASCII arrows look too simple, old-school or “retro” for what you have in mind, you’re probably after Unicode arrows instead - they are real single characters such as → and ⇐, in far greater variety.
Good news: I also run UnicodeArrows.org, a site dedicated to - you guessed it - Unicode arrows! And if you want all the characters rather than just the arrows, CharacterMap.org has you covered.
I made this website because I wanted a simple way to find ASCII arrows quickly.
You are probably not wondering who I am, but in case you are, you can have a look at GreatSoftwareCompany.com - that’s the website of my great company. See what I did there? Some people say I should do standup comedy. Actually, only my Mom says that.
And while I’m on the subject of shamelessly talking about myself: this is 100% free software. No ads, no tracking, no forced accounts, no upsells, none of that nonsense.
If you think that’s worth something, take a look at my Support Us page. It lists plenty of ways to help me keep this website running, and most of these ways to support won’t cost you anything. Thank you! You are awesome!
