The Dingbats block — U+2700 through U+27BF, 192 codepoints — is one of the strangest neighbourhoods in Unicode: an entire commercial typeface lifted into the standard character set, glyph for glyph, with its original ITC Zapf Dingbats codepoint numbering preserved. Hermann Zapf, the German type designer whose other work includes Palatino and Optima, was commissioned by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1978 to design a typeface of typographic ornaments — checkmarks, asterisks, stars, arrows, hands, scissors, hearts, snowflakes, decorative bullets, and assorted pictographs for use in display advertising and page layout. The resulting font, ITC Zapf Dingbats, became one of the most-distributed type-1 fonts of the 1980s and 1990s, bundled with PostScript printers and present on virtually every desktop computer of the era. When Unicode 1.1 (1993) needed a place for the world's typographic ornaments, the entire font was simply encoded as a block.
About this block
What is encoded here is therefore not a coherent symbol system but a designer's catalogue. The block opens with the scissors and telephone glyphs: ✁ U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS, ✂ U+2702 BLACK SCISSORS, ✃ U+2703 LOWER BLADE SCISSORS, ✄ U+2704 WHITE SCISSORS, ☎ "telephone" (which lives in Miscellaneous Symbols, not here), ✆ U+2706 TELEPHONE LOCATION SIGN, ✇ U+2707 TAPE DRIVE, ✈ U+2708 AIRPLANE, ✉ U+2709 ENVELOPE. The original font's hand-pointing fingers ☚ ☛ ☜ ☝ ☞ ☟ ☟ — the manicules used in older books to point at noteworthy passages — overflowed into the Miscellaneous Symbols block, but the matching ✌ U+270C VICTORY HAND, ✍ U+270D WRITING HAND, ✎ U+270E LOWER RIGHT PENCIL, ✏ U+270F PENCIL, and ✐ U+2710 UPPER RIGHT PENCIL are here.
The check and cross marks are by far the most-used Dingbats characters today. ✓ U+2713 CHECK MARK, ✔ U+2714 HEAVY CHECK MARK, ✕ U+2715 MULTIPLICATION X, ✖ U+2716 HEAVY MULTIPLICATION X, ✗ U+2717 BALLOT X, and ✘ U+2718 HEAVY BALLOT X are the working vocabulary of every checklist, every form, every test-result indicator in every UI. They predate emoji by decades and were already heavily used in print before Unicode existed.
A long sequence of stars and snowflakes follows. ✦ U+2726 BLACK FOUR-POINTED STAR, ✧ U+2727 WHITE FOUR-POINTED STAR, ✩–✯ at U+2729–U+272F give six- and twelve-pointed stars, ✰ U+2730 SHADOWED WHITE STAR. The asterisks ✱ U+2731 through ✻ U+273B include heavy, eight-pointed, twelve-pointed, sparkle, balloon-spoked, and teardrop-spoked variants — many ASCII-asterisk lookalikes that were once needed when typographers wanted a specific shape and ASCII offered only one. ❄ U+2744 SNOWFLAKE, ❅ U+2745 TIGHT TRIFOLIATE SNOWFLAKE, ❆ U+2746 HEAVY CHEVRON SNOWFLAKE round out the cluster.
The heart variants — ❤ U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART, ❥ U+2765 ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART, ❣ U+2763 HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION — are the typographic ancestors of the romantic-emoji set. The black heart ❤ became one of the most-used emoji in the world after Unicode 6.0 promoted it (with VS-16) to colour rendering on every platform. The decorative quotation marks ❛ ❜ ❝ ❞ U+275B–U+275E were lifted from Zapf's display-quote ornaments, distinct from the curly typographic quotation marks in General Punctuation. The bracket pairs ❨ ❩ ❪ ❫ ❬ ❭ ❮ ❯ ❰ ❱ ❲ ❳ ❴ ❵ at U+2768–U+2775 are heavy variants of standard brackets, useful for display headlines.
A run of numerical and arrow dingbats closes the block. ❶–❿ U+2776–U+277F are negative circled digits 1–10 (white on black); ➀–➉ U+2780–U+2789 are circled sans-serif digits; ➊–➓ U+278A–U+2793 are negative circled sans-serif. ➔ U+2794 HEAVY WIDE-HEADED RIGHTWARDS ARROW opens the arrow run that continues through ➡ U+27A1 BLACK RIGHTWARDS ARROW and on to a long sequence of decorative arrow variants ending at U+27BE.
One important rendering note: under UTS #51 (the emoji specification), most Dingbats characters default to text presentation. This means ✂ in plain running text is supposed to be drawn as a monochrome typographic glyph, not the colourful scissors emoji you may be used to. To force emoji rendering, append Variation Selector-16 (U+FE0F): ✂️ then renders as the colour emoji. A handful of Dingbats — including ✊ ✋ ✌ ✏ ✒ ✔ ✖ ✝ ✡ ✨ ✳ ✴ ❄ ❇ ❌ ❎ ❓ ❔ ❕ ❗ ❣ ❤ ➕ ➖ ➗ ➡ ➰ ➿ — default to emoji presentation per UTS #51. The how emoji work guide walks through the variation-selector mechanism.