Sagittarius symbol (♐)
♐ is the glyph of Sagittarius, the Archer, the ninth sign of the Western zodiac. Astrologers give its dates as 22 November to 21 December, and in their tradition it is a fire sign ruled by Jupiter.
Meaning
♐ is Unicode character U+2650 SAGITTARIUS: an arrow pointing up and to the right, with a short bar across its shaft. Richard Hinckley Allen (1899) reads it as the arrow with part of the bow, and Unicode cross-refers it to 🏹, bow and arrow. Sagittarius is Latin for archer; the Greek poet Aratos called the constellation Τοξευτής (Toxeutḗs), the Archer. The glyph is the sign’s shorthand in Western astrology.
Origin and history
Where the twelve sign glyphs came from is not known. Encyclopaedia Britannica says their history is unknown and that they first appear in Greek manuscripts of the late Middle Ages. Allen cites Clerke, who found them in manuscripts of about the 10th century but in carvings only from the 15th or 16th, and Brown, who quotes the antiquary C. W. King: King found the glyphs on no antique work and suspected “Arab sages” had devised them, a view Brown did not share. Allen gives the arrow and bow without hedging, unlike his readings of most of the other glyphs.
Allen argues that the Greeks did not invent the figure: Cleostratos may have been the first to write about it, but the evidence shows it is much older, from the Euphrates. The archer is now drawn as a centaur, half man and half horse, though it has also been called Minotauros, from a fabled earlier shape, and Ovid’s “Thessalian arrow” points to Thessaly as the birthplace of the Centaurs.
Centaur or Chiron?
Two centaurs share the sky, and writers have mixed them up. Allen notes the confusion between the zodiac’s centaur and the southern constellation Centaurus; some took Sagittarius for Chiron, the name it has in Hyginus and the Romans.
Why the dates no longer match the stars
The astrological Sagittarius begins on 22 November, but because of the precession of the equinoxes, Britannica says, the Sun now leaves Scorpius on 30 November and passes through Ophiuchus until 18 December before it reaches the stars of Sagittarius. Ophiuchus is not a member of the astrological zodiac.
What astrologers say Sagittarius means
In Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, Sagittarius is one of the four bicorporeal (two-bodied) signs, which share the weather of two seasons, and it lies toward the winter solstice. It is masculine and one of the two houses of Jupiter, with Pisces, signs Ptolemy calls “windy and fecund”. It belongs to the first triangle, Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, governed by the Sun by day and Jupiter by night. Astrology today, as Britannica describes it, makes Sagittarius a fire sign and a mutable one, and lists “adventurous, honest, tactless” as the traits traditionally attached to it. Britannica adds that astrology is not supported by science: no correlation has been found between birth dates and personality.
See also
Pisces symbol (♓), Aries symbol (♈), Taurus symbol (♉), Gemini symbol (♊), Cancer symbol (♋), Leo symbol (♌).
Sources
- Miscellaneous Symbols, Range: 2600–26FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+2650
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Sagittarius, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Sagittarius
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Aquarius, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Aquarius (on the zodiac signs’ symbols)
- Tetrabiblos, Book I, Claudius Ptolemy, 2nd century AD; translated by F. E. Robbins (Loeb Classical Library, 1940), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), I.11, I.17, I.18
- Zodiac, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica; last revised by Rick Livingston, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 11 September 2026), Signs and dates; Astrology; History
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research