By Maya Chen, lettering designer and type educator · Checked by Jordan Hale · · How we review content
Key facts
- Text symbols are ordinary Unicode characters drawn by your font, so they copy and paste, scale with the text, take its colour and can be searched for.
- An emoji is a character the system paints as a colour picture, and some characters, such as the heart ❤ (U+2764), can appear as either form.
- The invisible variation selectors U+FE0E (text) and U+FE0F (emoji) ask a character to appear in one form or the other.
- Each platform, not Unicode, decides whether a symbol is accepted in a name or bio, and those rules can change without announcement.
- Older symbols in the Miscellaneous Symbols, Arrows and Dingbats blocks are carried by nearly every font, while newer or rarer ones may need a fallback font.
- Windows Alt codes exist only for a short list of legacy symbols, while typing a hex code and pressing Alt and X in Word for Windows works for any code point.
What are text symbols?
Unicode defines more than a hundred thousand characters. A small fraction of them are symbols you can drop into a sentence the way you would a letter: card suits, stars, arrows, check marks, brackets and ornaments. They are not images. They are characters, so they copy and paste, scale with the text, take on its colour, and can be searched for.
That is also what separates them from emoji. An emoji is a character the operating system paints as a full-colour picture in its own artwork. A text symbol is drawn by whichever font your device uses for it. The boundary is blurry because some characters exist in both forms. The heart ❤ (U+2764) is the classic case: depending on the app, it arrives as a plain monochrome glyph or a red emoji. The section’s pages explain this for each symbol family, including the invisible variation selectors (U+FE0E for text, U+FE0F for emoji) that ask for one form or the other.
This section covers text symbols for names, bios, messages and documents. It is not an emoji keyboard: if you want a picture, your phone’s emoji keyboard does that job better.
How do I use these symbol pages?
Each symbol page groups its characters by look and origin rather than listing them in code point order. Every character shows its exact Unicode name and code point, so you can check what you are pasting. Tap a character to copy it, or use the group’s copy-all button to take the whole set.
Then read the guidance below the grid. It covers the questions that come up in practice:
- Which characters are safe. Older characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols, Arrows and Dingbats blocks are carried by nearly every font. Newer or rarer ones may need a fallback font.
- What turns into an emoji. The pages mark characters that commonly render as colour emoji, so you can pick a different one if you need a monochrome result.
- How to type it without copying. Windows Alt codes (only for a short list of legacy characters), the Word hex-and-Alt-X trick, the Mac Character Viewer and phone keyboards.
- Accessibility. Screen readers announce symbols by name, so decorative runs can become noisy. The pages suggest how much is too much.
Greek letters such as π, Σ and Ω are characters too: for those, see the separate Greek alphabet section.
Which symbol families should I open first?
The three most requested families are the best place to start:
- Heart symbols: hearts with exact Unicode names, and why ❤ turns red on phones.
- Star symbols: which stars stay monochrome and which turn into emoji.
- Arrow symbols: arrows with their Alt codes and the cases where ➡ and ↔ become emoji.
For faces made from single characters, the smiley symbols and cute symbols pages cover the eyes, mouths and tiny ornaments. For whole faces such as ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), see text faces; for lines and frames, the box drawing characters.
Which platforms accept symbols?
Whether a symbol is accepted is a decision made by each platform, not by Unicode. A character that works in a bio may be rejected in a game name field, and rules change without announcement. We record what we have been able to verify on the platform pages, such as Instagram fonts and Discord fonts, and where we have not verified something we say so. The safest approach for any important name is to paste, save and check the result on a second device.
How do I put symbols around a name?
If you want symbols placed around a name automatically, the text decorator wraps text in ornament patterns, and the stylish name generator combines letter styles with decorations. For turning decorated text back into plain letters, there is the unstyle text tool.
Why does the same symbol look different on different devices?
You will notice that the same symbol looks different on different devices. A star may have thicker points on Android than on Windows, and a heart suit may be taller in one font than another. That is expected, because Unicode defines the character and its name, not the exact artwork. When appearance matters, such as in a logo or printed design, use a symbol in a font you control, or draw it as an image or SVG rather than relying on the recipient’s system font.
For guidance on how fancy characters affect people who use assistive technology, see our fancy text accessibility guide. Whichever text symbols you choose, keep the meaning in plain words and let the symbols decorate it.