Male symbol (♂)
The sign for male: a circle with an arrow pointing up and to the right. It was the sign of the planet Mars, and of iron in alchemy, before the botanist Linnaeus used it for male plants in the 18th century.
Meaning
Unicode names the character U+2642 MALE SIGN and gives “Mars” and “alchemical symbol for iron” as its other names. Britannica describes the shape as a circle below an arrow pointing diagonally upward to the right. It marks male in biology and medicine and on restroom signs, and Unicode’s emoji add it to a figure to make the male version of it: a runner followed by ♂ is 🏃♂️, “man running”. Its pair is the female symbol, ♀.
Origin and history
The sign belonged to a planet first. The ancient Greeks took from the Babylonians the idea that the planets bore the names of gods, the neurologist G. D. Schott wrote in the BMJ in 2005, and the crafts that worked metal later tied each god and planet to a metal. Iron, baser and harder than gold, went with Mars and the masculine. Britannica gives the same pairing: iron stood for Mars, and for masculinity, combat and fortitude.
The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus brought the sign into biology in the 18th century. He used the Mars and Venus signs on his botanical charts for male and female plants, Britannica says. Schott adds that Linnaeus copied the signs for male and female flowers from a 17th-century pharmacopoeia, the Pharmacopoeia Leovardensis, as a shorthand “in order to save space”, and that from botany they passed into zoology, human biology and genetics.
Shield and spear, or a Greek name?
NASA’s page on the solar system’s symbols says the sign shows the shield and spear of Mars, the god of war. Schott gives a different origin as “the most established view”: the sign began as a contraction, in Greek script, of the planet’s Greek name, Thouros. The derivation was traced in a Dutch study of 1942 by H. W. Renkema.
On family pedigrees
Around 1900 the Mars and Venus signs were common on the pedigrees in genetics papers, and leading British geneticists such as Galton and Pearson recommended them, Schott found. They gradually gave way to the square and the circle, which American geneticists preferred because they were easier to read and took up less space. Those shapes go back to Pliny Earle, physician to the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York, who charted colour blindness in his own family in 1845 and wrote: “Males are represented by squares and females by circles.” A square on a genogram today is a male family member.
Read next
- Next in Gender symbolsFemale symbol (♀)The sign for female: a circle above a small cross. It was the sign of the planet Venus, and of copper in alchemy, before the botanist Linnaeus used it for female plants in the 18th century.
- In Occult and alchemical symbolsPlanetary metals (☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄)The seven signs alchemists wrote for the seven metals known in antiquity, each borrowed from the heavenly body it was paired with: the sun ☉ for gold, the moon ☽ for silver, Mercury ☿ for quicksilver, Venus ♀ for copper, Mars ♂ for iron, Jupiter ♃ for tin and Saturn ♄ for lead.
See also
Male and female symbol (⚥), Transgender symbol (⚧).
Sources
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2642 MALE SIGN
- Sex symbols ancient and modern: their origins and iconography on the pedigree, by G. D. Schott, BMJ 2005;331(7531):1509–1510, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1509, BMJ (PubMed Central full text), Classical origins; Squares and circles
- Solar System Symbols, NASA Science, NASA, The Symbols
- Gender symbol, by August Samie, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 21 November 2025 (Internet Archive copy, 13 December 2025), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction; history
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, person-activity; gender
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from arrows or circles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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