Gothic / Old English font generator

How to type in Old English letters

1. Type your text. The gothic and bold gothic versions update as you type, and so do the four real blackletter fonts below the tool.
2. Copy a style. Press Copy on a row, or click the row outside the text. The Decoration chips frame it with a cross, a dagger or a fleur-de-lis.
3. Paste it anywhere you type: an Instagram or TikTok bio, a Discord or game name, a caption or a message.

If you need the lettering as an image instead, for a print, a logo sketch or a tattoo, the real fonts are the better choice: they have numbers and accents, and the link under them opens the tattoo font generator with your text and the gothic fonts selected, ready to download as a PNG.

Old English, gothic, blackletter, Fraktur: one look, many names

People search for the same lettering under four names. Blackletter is the type designer's umbrella term, for the dense, dark letters with broken curves that scribes in northern Europe wrote with a broad pen from about the 12th century. Gothic is the older nickname: Renaissance Italians, who preferred round Roman letters, used it as a put-down. Old English is the name that stuck in Britain and America, partly through typefaces sold under that name, and it has nothing to do with the Old English language, which was written centuries earlier in a different, rounder hand.

Within blackletter there are distinct families:

Fraktur stayed in everyday use in German-speaking countries for far longer than blackletter did anywhere else, until it was officially dropped in 1941. Mathematicians kept it alive as a set of symbols, and that is why Unicode has a Fraktur alphabet at all: letters like 𝔤 name objects in algebra, and ℜ and ℑ stand for the real and imaginary parts of a number. This generator borrows those symbols.

Why "gothic font" also finds Century Gothic

To add to the confusion, 19th-century American type foundries used gothic for plain sans-serif type, the opposite of blackletter. Franklin Gothic and Century Gothic, both everyday sans-serifs, carry that name. If you want the medieval look, search for blackletter, Fraktur or Old English rather than gothic.

Where gothic lettering works

Blackletter brings instant associations: tradition, craft, rebellion, depending on the setting. It shows up in newspaper nameplates, certificates, beer and whisky labels, barbershops, streetwear, tattoo and Chicano lettering, and metal and hip hop artwork. Online, a gothic name or one gothic word in a bio does the same job in a few characters.

• Keep it short. Blackletter was designed for pages read slowly by candlelight, and it is hard work for eyes used to modern type. A name, a title or a single word reads; a paragraph does not.
• Never use all capitals. Blackletter capitals are ornate and were made to start a word, not to sit side by side. An all-caps gothic word is close to unreadable: write it with a capital and lowercase.
• Mind the lookalikes. In Fraktur some letters are easy to confuse, such as 𝔅 and 𝔙, or 𝔫 and 𝔲. Check that your word reads to someone who has not seen it typed plain.
• Pair it with something plain. One gothic line next to a clean sans-serif looks deliberate; gothic everywhere looks like a costume.

Gothic numbers and accented letters

Unicode encodes the Fraktur alphabet for mathematics, and mathematicians do not use gothic numbers, so there are none: digits stay plain when you copy gothic text. The same goes for accented letters like é or ü, which stay in your normal font unless you tick Strip accents.

Real blackletter fonts include both. The second card under the tool sets your text and the numbers 0 to 9 in UnifrakturMaguntia and three other free blackletter fonts. Use them for a year on a label, a date in a design or a number tattoo, and take the PNG from the tattoo font generator if you need a file. For other copy and paste looks, see the cursive font generator, the Instagram fonts page and the small text generator.

Accessibility

Screen readers treat gothic symbols as math. Depending on the app, they may read "mathematical fraktur capital O" for each letter, spell the word out or skip it. Search will not match a gothic word to the plain one either, so a gothic business name is harder to find.

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