Crown symbols for kings, queens and names

👑 is the emoji named crown (U+1F451). It came with Unicode 6.0 in 2010, the first big batch of emoji, and phones draw it as a small gold crown, often set with jewels. Being a picture, it keeps its own colours on any background, and each phone maker draws its own version.

The everyday symbol sets have no text crown of their own, so people borrow from the chess set that Unicode has included since the early 1990s. The king ♔ ♚ is topped with a small cross; the queen ♕ ♛ wears a coronet of points, usually with a ball on each tip. In the official names, “white” means the outline piece and “black” the filled one, after the two sides of a chessboard. All four take the colour and size of your text, so they sit beside a name without a bright emoji pulling the eye away from it.

At small sizes the queen’s row of points reads as a crown more clearly than the king’s cross, so ♛ is the easier pick when you simply want a crown. ♟, the pawn, is the only chess piece with an emoji form (since 2018), which is why it can turn into a picture while the kings and queens always stay text.

A phone draws only the emoji its software knows, and anything newer shows as an empty box. The crown itself is safe almost everywhere; the newest royals are the ones to check before you build a bio around them.

The prince came six years after the princess, and 🫅 followed in 2021 as a royal of no particular gender. All three take a skin tone: press and hold one on the emoji keyboard to choose.

• Praise. “You dropped this 👑” is a running joke that hands someone their crown back, usually after a sharp comeback, a big win or a great photo.
• Best in show. Next to a dish, a product or a player, 👑 marks the favourite or the champion, much as 🏆 does.
• Birthdays. “Birthday queen 👑” or “birthday king ♚” on the day is about as common as crowns get.
• Self-titles. “♛ queen of the bake sale” in a bio reads as confident when it is a little tongue in cheek, and as boastful when it isn’t.
• Gaming names. Clan and player names often put ♚ or ♛ inside brackets, as in 【♛】, next to a clan tag.

• Use the name field or the bio. Handles allow only letters, numbers, underscores and full stops, so a crown in a username is rejected.
• Keep the name itself in ordinary letters. People search for you by typing it normally, so let the crown sit beside the name rather than inside it.
• One crown on each side is plenty. “♛ Asha ♛” reads as a frame; four crowns in a row read as clutter.
• Frames from other scripts, such as ꧁ ꧂ from Javanese, are popular in gaming names but are left out of the grid: a phone without a Javanese font shows boxes instead.

Tip: A screen reader may read ♛ by its name, so “Queen ♛” can come out as “Queen, black chess queen”. When the word queen is already there, the symbol adds nothing for a listener.