About Lightning Symbols
β‘ is the character almost everyone arrives looking for, and it has one drawback: it is an emoji, so it comes in fixed yellow and gets filtered by name fields that block emoji. The two most useful characters on this page are the ones underneath it β β― and Ο β which are ordinary text and behave completely differently.
β― and Ο Are the Practical Picks
β― is the downwards zigzag arrow, U+21AF. It is a plain text character: monochrome, inheriting the colour and weight of the text around it, and accepted by name fields that reject emoji outright.
Ο is stranger. It is the Greek letter koppa, an archaic letter that fell out of use in the alphabet and survived as a numeral. It has nothing to do with electricity β it was adopted for gamer tags purely because its shape reads as a lightning bolt to eyes expecting one. Because it is classified as a letter rather than a symbol, it passes through some of the strictest name filters.
The Two Emoji
β‘ is the high voltage sign and reads clearly at any size. π©οΈ and βοΈ are weather scenes β cloud with lightning, and cloud with lightning and rain β both built from a base character plus a variation selector. Both are covered further on the weather symbols page.
Two characters that used to appear here have been removed: βΊ, a sixteen-pointed asterisk, and ⨳, a mathematical operator called smash product. Neither depicts lightning β both were grouped here on a loose visual resemblance. βΊ is genuinely useful as an ornament and remains in its proper place among the decorative symbols.