Very Heavy Reverse Solidus refers to a proposed, heavier-weight version of the backslash intended as an emoji-style or pictographic symbol rather than a plain text glyph. It occasionally surfaced in community wishlists and discussions from the mid-2010s, when users and designers explored adding bolder punctuation and UI marks to emoji sets, but it never became an officially approved emoji. The idea promised a visually emphatic backslash that could pair with a similarly styled Very Heavy Solidus, addressing use cases in signage, interface design, and stylized text. People imagined it helping with meme and ASCII-art layouts, the shrug emoticon Β―\_(γ)_/Β―, Windows-style file paths, coding/escaping contexts, and math or markup where a thicker stroke would stand out.
Concept imagery and mockups typically depicted a thick diagonal stroke running from the upper right to the lower left, heavier than the standard backslash, sometimes with slightly rounded terminals. If it had ever appeared in an Apple-style set, it likely would have been a solid dark gray or black glyph with clean, high-contrast edges, possibly centered on a light square tileβakin to other monochrome symbol emojisβthough no official Apple design was produced. Despite niche interest, the concept faced obstacles: it was easily confusable with the normal backslash, offered limited expressive range compared to pictorial emojis, and raised concerns about mixing code-relevant punctuation with emoji presentation. These factors, along with Unicodeβs general caution around promoting basic punctuation to emoji status, likely contributed to its lack of adoption.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
This emoji was one of the "suggested emojis" the Unicode group unveiled in June 2014 [article], however, it has been, and still is, up to the companies who support emoji in their operating systems to provide not only images but also an algorithm to replace the emoji code into the emoji image.
