Planet Earth

Also called Terra, the earth sign, ♁

Not one of the seven lights; the printed signs are medieval and later

Planet Earth meaning

Planet Earth is the world the old seven lights were watched from, not one of those lights. The Unicode character ♁ (U+2641) is named EARTH and draws a globus cruciger. The barred triangle is a different mark, the alchemical earth, filed at its own page.

♁U+2641

The floor of the old cosmos, given a sign only after the wanderers had theirs.

The name. Earth is the English name of the ground, from Old English eorþe. It was not a wanderer’s name. You do not watch the floor cross the sky. Latin terra and Greek gē name the same place. The astronomical sign is a label added once the floor had to sit in a table beside the lights.

Download drawing

Where it comes from

The septenary is Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They move against the stars. Earth does not, if you are standing on it. Medieval tables therefore had no need to give the floor a wanderer’s glyph. When a diagram needed to name the place you stand, printers used a cross and a circle. Two drawings got confused. One is the globus cruciger: an orb with a cross set on top of it. Unicode encodes that picture as EARTH, U+2641, the character ♁. The other is a cross inside a circle, a circled cross, used in some planetary tables and easy to mistake for the math sign circled plus, ⊕, which is U+2295 and is an operator, not a planet. A third character, U+1F728, is often mislabeled Earth on casual charts. Unicode names it ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR VERDIGRIS. It is not this page. A fourth character, the barred downward triangle U+1F703, is ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR EARTH. That one already has a page in this cabinet, under the slug earth, because the workshop’s element is not the planet. This entry does not replace it. Standards bodies do not agree on a single icon. Astronomical fonts that follow Unicode’s Miscellaneous Symbols will give you the globus cruciger. Alchemical fonts will give you the triangle. A circled cross in a horoscope book is a house convention of that book. The lexicon’s drawing is the globus cruciger, a circle with a cross rising from it, so it cannot be mistaken for the triangle.

Astrology

The place you stand

Classical astrology casts a chart for a person on the earth. It does not need Earth as a planet in the seven. The ascendant is the east point of that person’s horizon. The lights move. The ground is the condition. Later astrologers who wanted a glyph for the planet were solving a printing problem, not recovering a missing Babylonian god. Earth as temperament is a modern addition. The old qualities of cold and dry belonged to the element, which is the triangle, not to this orb.

Modern

Which sign a font will give you

If a page shows U+2641, it is showing the character Unicode named EARTH. If it shows U+1F703, it is showing alchemical earth. If it shows U+1F728, it is showing verdigris, whatever the caption claims. If it shows a cross inside a circle and calls the picture Earth, it may be a font’s private drawing or the math operator U+2295 used as a picture. Those are four different decisions. A caption that says “the earth symbol” without a code point is not yet a fact. The code point is the fact. This cabinet keeps the planet and the element apart so a search for one does not overwrite the other.

Worth knowing

Two Earth signs exist in Unicode: ♁ U+2641 (globus cruciger) and 🜨 U+1F728, encoded as the alchemical sign for verdigris. Source
The IAU style manual discourages planet symbols in journals, preferring letter abbreviations (Me, V, E, Ma, J, S, U, N). Source

Questions

What does the Planet Earth mean?

How do I type the Planet Earth?

The character is ♁ (U+2641).

Near this

Sources

Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.

Your margin

Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.

symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 20 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.