How to copy and paste symbols
- Find the symbol. Browse the categories, or type what you want in the search box: heart, arrow, tick, degree, trademark. You can also search by code (
U+2665,2665or♥) or paste a symbol you found elsewhere to learn its name. - Click it. The symbol is copied to your clipboard straight away, and its name and codes appear in the panel. On a phone, tap it.
- Paste it. Press Ctrl+V on Windows or a Chromebook, or Cmd+V on a Mac. On a phone, press and hold in the text box and choose Paste.
Need more than one? Every symbol you click is also added to Your collection. Click ★︎ three times, type a few words between them, and copy the whole line with Copy all. The last symbols you copied stay under Recent the next time you open the page on the same device.
With a keyboard, Tab into a grid, move with the arrow keys and press Enter to copy. Press Enter in the search box to jump to the first result.
Where you can paste symbols
These are not images. Each symbol is a character from Unicode, the standard every phone, computer and app uses to store text, so it pastes anywhere you can type: Instagram and TikTok bios and captions, Facebook, X, LinkedIn posts and headlines, WhatsApp, Discord, email subject lines, Word, Google Docs, Canva and website builders.
A few places are stricter:
- Usernames and handles usually accept only letters, numbers and a few marks such as the underscore and the period. Put symbols in the display name or the bio instead.
- Ads and shop listings often have their own rules about decorative characters, and a review can reject them. Check the platform's policy before you use them in paid copy.
- Screen readers announce many symbols by their names. A bio written as ★彡 ʙʀᴀɴᴅ 彡★ can be read aloud as a string of strange words. Use symbols as accents next to plain words, not as the words themselves, and never to carry meaning on their own.
Text symbols or emoji
The heart ♥︎ and the heart ❤️ are not the same thing. Many symbols exist in two styles. The text style is drawn by the font, in the same color as the words around it. The emoji style is a small color picture drawn by the device maker, so it looks different on an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows computer. Unicode controls which one you get with an invisible character called a variation selector: U+FE0E asks for the text style and U+FE0F for the emoji style.
| Text style | Emoji style | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| ♥︎ Black heart suit, U+2665 | ❤️ Red heart, U+2764 U+FE0F | The text heart takes the color of your text. The emoji heart is always red. |
| ★︎ Black star, U+2605 | ⭐ Star, U+2B50 | Different characters: the emoji star is yellow on every platform. |
| ✔︎ Heavy check mark, U+2714 | ✅ Check mark button, U+2705 | The green box is a separate emoji, not a colored version of the check mark. |
| ☀︎ Black sun with rays, U+2600 | ☀️ Sun, U+2600 U+FE0F | Same character, with or without the emoji selector. |
Unicode names describe shapes, not colors: black means filled and white means outlined. That is why the solid heart ♥︎ is officially the Black heart suit and the outline ♡ is the White heart suit. The search here understands everyday words too, so filled heart, outline star and tick all work.
Type symbols from your keyboard
For a symbol you use every day, a shortcut is faster than copying:
- Windows 10 and 11: press Win + . (period) to open the emoji panel, then choose the Ω tab for symbols.
- Mac: press Ctrl + Cmd + Space to open the Character Viewer, which has every symbol with search.
- iPhone and Android: press and hold a letter to see its accented versions, and a punctuation key to see related marks.
| Symbol | Windows (Alt code on the number pad) | Mac (US keyboard layout) |
|---|---|---|
| © Copyright | Alt + 0169 | Option + G |
| ® Registered | Alt + 0174 | Option + R |
| ™ Trade mark | Alt + 0153 | Option + 2 |
| ° Degree | Alt + 0176 | Option + Shift + 8 |
| • Bullet | Alt + 0149 | Option + 8 |
| € Euro | Alt + 0128 | Option + Shift + 2 |
| £ Pound | Alt + 0163 | Option + 3 |
Alt codes need a number pad with Num Lock on. On a laptop without one, the emoji panel is the easier route.
Symbols in HTML and CSS
If your page is saved as UTF-8 and declares <meta charset="utf-8">, which every current website builder does, you can paste the symbol straight into your HTML. Codes are still useful when a template or an email tool mangles special characters, or when a character is hard to see in the source. Click the HTML or CSS box in the panel to copy the code of the selected symbol:
| Where | Format | Example for ♥ |
|---|---|---|
| HTML, named | An ampersand, the name and a semicolon, for the characters that have one (over 2,000 names) | ♥ |
| HTML, numeric | The code point in hexadecimal, for any character | ♥ |
| CSS | A backslash and the code point, inside a content string | content: "\2665"; |
| Unicode | U+ and the code point, the form used in specs and character tables | U+2665 |
For icons that matter, such as a menu or a close button, use an SVG icon with a text label rather than a symbol: you control its exact shape on every device, and screen readers get a proper name.
Why a symbol shows up as an empty box
A symbol is stored as a number, and the device reading it needs a font that contains a drawing for that number. When none of its fonts does, it shows an empty box or a question mark, sometimes called tofu. The text is not broken: paste it on a newer device and the symbol appears.
Common symbols such as arrows, hearts, stars, ticks and currency signs are covered by the standard fonts of Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. Rarer ones, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the cute category or very new emoji, can be missing on older phones and computers. This page draws every symbol with the fonts on your own device, so if a symbol looks right here, it will look right in other apps on the same device. Your readers may use something older, so test important posts on a second phone.
Methodology and limits
- Selection
- 1,145 symbols in 25 categories, chosen by DEMARCA for the things people search for most (hearts, stars, arrows, ticks, bullets, cute and aesthetic symbols) and for wide font support. A symbol can sit in more than one category. The 34 multi-character combinations, such as text faces and dividers, are our own selection and their names are descriptive, not official.
- Names
- Every single character shows its official name from the Unicode Character Database, which never changes once assigned, read from the open unicode-name package (version 1.2.1). Emoji show their short English name from the Unicode CLDR project, read from emojibase-data (version 17.0.0), with the Unicode name underneath. Names are shown in sentence case; the official uppercase form is in the panel.
- Search
- Matches every word you type against the name, the Unicode name, the category, CLDR emoji keywords and a short list of everyday words we added (such as tick, filled and outline). Results that start with your word come first. Code points (U+2665, 2665) and HTML entity names (hearts) also match.
- Codes
- U+ codes list every code point in the copied text, including invisible variation selectors. The HTML entity is the named reference from the WHATWG HTML standard when one exists, otherwise a hexadecimal numeric reference. CSS escapes are separated by a space, which CSS reads as the end of each escape.
- Copying
- Uses the browser's Clipboard API, with a fallback for older browsers. Recent symbols are kept in your browser's local storage on this device only. A cookieless usage event records that the tool was used, never what you copied.
- Limits
- We cannot control the fonts on the device that receives your text. Platforms may strip or reject some characters in names, ads and listings.
Sources
Show all 7 sources
- Unicode Character Database, Unicode Consortium, the source of the official character names and code points
- Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji, Unicode Consortium, on emoji and text presentation and variation selectors
- Unicode CLDR Project, Unicode Consortium, the source of the English emoji names and keywords
- HTML Standard: named character references, WHATWG, the list of HTML entity names
- Using character escapes in markup and CSS, W3C Internationalization
- Use emoji and symbols on Mac, Apple Support, for the Character Viewer
- unicode-name, Jan Lelis (MIT license), and Emojibase, Miles Johnson (MIT license), the open packages the names are read from