Venus symbol
The Venus symbol (♀) is a depiction of a circle with a small cross below it. The symbol is historically associated with the Roman goddess Venus or the Greek goddess Aphrodite. It has a Unicode designation of U+2640, and is used in various media to represent things associated in some way with the mythological character, including:
The female sex
The planet Venus
The chemical element copper
Feminism in philosophy and sociology
The female connector in a pair of mating connectors or fasteners
A widely held belief is that it represents a hand mirror (originally often made of bronze), with the top half of the symbol representing the actual mirror, and the bottom half representing the handle of the mirror. However, another plausible origin of the symbol is it being a contraction of script Greek.
See also
Classical planets in Western alchemy
Mars symbol
Gender symbol
The ankh, an Egyptian hieroglyph resembling the Venus symbol
References