Text symbols to copy and paste

Every character you can type has a number in Unicode, the standard that phones and computers use for text. Letters have numbers, and so do ★, ✓ and ♪. That is why a symbol needs no app, special keyboard or font download: the fonts on your phone already know how to draw it, and it pastes anywhere ordinary text goes. The symbols people reach for come from a handful of Unicode’s named blocks.

Two of those names explain a lot about the shapes. Dingbat is a printers’ word for an ornament, and most of Unicode’s Dingbats block was taken from a single typeface of them, which is why its stars, ticks and florettes share one style. Box Drawing holds the lines that text-only computer screens once used to draw menus and windows.

Some characters were plain text for years before Unicode gave them an emoji form as well, so the same character can show as a flat symbol in one app and a small colour picture in another. On this page that applies to ♥ ♠ ♣ ♦ ✔ ✖ ☑ ▪ ▫ ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ ❄ ☘ © ® ™ ✉ ☎ ✂ ✈ ☮ ☯ and ☺. Everything else here has no emoji form and always stays text.

An invisible character typed straight after the symbol settles which version you get: U+FE0E asks for the text style and U+FE0F for the emoji. Apps don’t all respect it, so when a row has to look uniform, build it from symbols with no emoji form. Some look-alikes are different characters altogether.

They will see the same character, drawn by a different font. Apple, Google and Samsung each ship their own symbol fonts, so ✦ can look slimmer on one phone than on another. Detailed ornaments such as ❂ change the most from phone to phone, and plain shapes such as ● ■ ▲ and ★ the least.

Age matters too. Nearly every symbol on this page was already in Unicode 3.2, published in 2002, and the newest, the rupee sign ₹, arrived in 2010. A phone with no font for a character shows an empty box in its place. These symbols rarely hit that problem; newer additions are where boxes still turn up, such as the 2020 block of symbols from old home computers.

• Full-width brackets. 【 】 and 「 」 come from Chinese and Japanese typesetting and are as wide as a Chinese character, so they leave more room around a short word than you might expect.
• Boxes made of lines. Box-drawing characters join up neatly only in fixed-width fonts. Instagram and Facebook use proportional text, so a box drawn over several lines drifts out of shape, while a single line such as ── ✦ ── holds up fine.
• Symbols inside words. A symbol in the middle of a word, as in c☆ffee, stops search and hashtags from matching it, and a screen reader can no longer say the word.

Every symbol has an official Unicode name, and two words in those names catch people out: black means filled and white means outline, whatever colour the symbol ends up on screen. So ★ is black star and ☆ white star, ♥ black heart suit and ♡ white heart suit, ■ black square and □ white square. Many of the labels on this page use the same words.

The names are what the Character Viewer on a Mac (Control, Command and Space) and Character Map on Windows search, so one word from a name turns up a whole family at once.

Keyboard shortcuts for everyday signs such as © ® ™ and ° are on the keyboard symbols page. On a phone, the quickest route is to copy a symbol here once and save it as a text shortcut.

• Pick a small kit, such as one star, one bullet and one pair of brackets, and use only those across your name, bio and highlight names. Repeating the same few makes them look intentional.
• Brackets make tidy labels. 【 shop 】 or 「 menu 」 marks a heading inside a bio without shouting in capitals.
• On Instagram, symbols work in the name field, bio, captions, comments, DMs and Notes, but not in the username, which takes only letters, numbers, full stops and underscores.
• Facebook is stricter about names: its rules don’t allow symbols in a profile name, so keep them for posts, comments and your bio.

Tip: A screen reader speaks each symbol by its name, so “★ new ★” can come out as “black star new black star”. Put symbols at the edges of a line, where they decorate, and let words carry the meaning.