About this character
U+2713 CHECK MARK is the lightweight tick that appears in the Dingbats block, added in Unicode 1.1 (1993) as part of the wholesale incorporation of Hermann Zapf's ITC Zapf Dingbats. Its shape — a short downstroke followed by a longer upstroke at an angle — derives from the gesture a teacher or auditor makes when marking an item as correct, present, or accounted for. The symbol predates the printing press; mediaeval scribes used a similar mark to indicate verified entries in account books.
In digital interfaces, U+2713 has been displaced for many purposes by the emoji-style U+2705 ✅ WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK, which renders as a coloured icon by default. The text-presentation mark survives in plain-text contexts: in command-line tools, in CSV exports, in code comments, in academic notation, in linguistic feature matrices ([+voice], [✓grammatical]). When you need a denser glyph for emphasis, U+2714 ✔ HEAVY CHECK MARK sits next door in the Dingbats block — same shape, heavier weight.
U+2713 is one of four "yes/no" symbols that are constantly mixed up. The check mark says this item is correct or present. U+2717 ✗ BALLOT X is the corresponding rejection mark. U+2611 ☑ BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK and U+2612 ☒ BALLOT BOX WITH X combine the mark with a containing square, which is what an actual checkbox in a paper form looks like — useful for representing UI controls in documentation. There is also U+1F5F8 🗸 LIGHT CHECK MARK in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block for a thinner stylistic variant. For ARIA-described checkbox states in HTML, prefer the semantic <input type="checkbox">; the character is for display.