Diamond Symbols

Three ways to draw a diamond

A diamond on screen comes from one of three families, and mixing them is the main reason diamond decorations look uneven. The first is the card suit, ♦ (BLACK DIAMOND SUIT, U+2666) and ♢ (WHITE DIAMOND SUIT, U+2662), which sits with the other three suits in the Miscellaneous Symbols block. The second is the geometric family, in the Geometric Shapes block: ◆ (BLACK DIAMOND), ◇ (WHITE DIAMOND) and ◈ (WHITE DIAMOND CONTAINING BLACK SMALL DIAMOND). The third is the emoji family: 💎 for the gem and the coloured diamond signs 🔶 🔷 🔸 🔹, which are pictures rather than shapes.

All of them are called diamonds, but the card suit was designed to sit beside the heart, club and spade, the geometric ones to be neutral shapes, and the emoji to be icons. Fonts size and align each family differently, so a row of ♦ next to a row of ◆ will not be the same height.

The suit versus the shape

The practical difference between ♦ and ◆ is how phones treat them. ♦ is also in the emoji set, so iOS and Android often draw it as a red card suit in colour. ◆ is purely geometric and takes the colour of the surrounding text, so it turns white on dark mode and black on light mode. If you want to use a diamond on both a dark and light background without a surprise, use ◆ or ◇.

The white and black naming is also worth understanding. “Black” means filled and “white” means outline, whatever the real colours are. ♢ and ◇ are the hollow versions, handy for alternation patterns such as ◆◇◆. ⬥ and ⬦ (BLACK and WHITE MEDIUM DIAMOND) are slightly bigger, and ⬩ (BLACK SMALL DIAMOND) is small enough to work as a bullet or a dot between words.

Ornamental diamonds

The second group takes diamonds into decoration. ❖ (BLACK DIAMOND MINUS WHITE X) is a diamond with four notches, a classic section-break ornament. ✦ and ✧ (BLACK and WHITE FOUR POINTED STAR) are pointed diamonds, more like sparkles than gems, and they are the best choices for glittery decoration. ⟡ (WHITE CONCAVE-SIDED DIAMOND) is concave, and ◊ (LOZENGE) is a tall, narrow diamond used in typography and in mathematics.

⋄ (DIAMOND OPERATOR) is a small diamond that sits at mid height and is used as an operator in some logic notation. In decoration it works as a small separator, as in word ⋄ word. Treat it as a punctuation mark, not a shape, because its size varies widely between fonts.

Gems and coloured diamonds

💎 (GEM STONE) is the emoji people most often mean by “diamond”. It is blue in most designs, though shape and shade differ by platform. 💠 (DIAMOND SHAPE WITH A DOT INSIDE) is a decorated blue diamond. The coloured set, 🔶 (LARGE ORANGE DIAMOND), 🔷 (LARGE BLUE DIAMOND), 🔸 and 🔹, are small marker emoji for colour-coding lists. They are not text-colour-aware and look different between platforms.

Diamond versus related shapes

For card suits as a family, the heart symbols page covers ♥ and its relatives. For pointed stars that are often interchangeable with diamonds, see star symbols and sparkle symbols.

Using diamonds in borders and dividers

Diamonds are popular as separators because they are symmetrical and tolerate repetition. Common patterns include ◆◇◆◇◆, ⬩⬩⬩ and ❖ ❖ ❖. They also make good bullets: ◆ or ⬩ at the start of a line gives a tidy marker that is more distinctive than •. In a bio, keep strings of diamonds short, since every character counts and they wrap on a narrow screen. The border symbols page has corner and frame pieces.

How to type a diamond

1. Windows Alt code. Hold Alt and type 4 on the numeric keypad for ♦. This is the classic card-suit code.
2. Word. Type 2666 and press Alt then X for ♦. Use 25C6 for ◆, 25C7 for ◇ and 2756 for ❖.
3. Windows emoji panel. Press the Windows key and the period key, then search diamond.
4. Mac. The Character Viewer from Control, Command and Space finds all of them. Search diamond.
5. Phones. The emoji keyboard gives 💎 and the coloured diamonds. For ◆ and ❖, use a symbols keyboard or copy from this page.

Accessibility

Screen readers announce each diamond by its Unicode name, such as “black diamond suit” or “black diamond minus white X”. The latter is long, and a row of ❖ is announced repeatedly. For bullets, use real list markup so that the reader announces a list, not a string of symbols. Do not use ◆ alone to mean “important” or “new”. A word is clearer. The fancy text accessibility guide describes how this works.

Missing glyphs

All of the characters on this page are widely supported, but ⟡ and ⬖ are less common in fonts and may show as empty boxes. If so, see why fancy text shows boxes.