Unicode characters and symbols

The top of the page lists commonly needed characters that are not on a US keyboard, grouped as:

• Typography: curly quotes “ ” ‘ ’, the en dash –, the em dash —, ellipsis …, middle dot ·, section §, pilcrow ¶, non-breaking space and per mille ‰
• Math: × ÷ ± ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ √ ∞ π ∑ ° ½ ¼ ² ³
• Currency and units: $ ¢ € £ ¥ ₿ ℉ ℃ µ Ω №
• Arrows: ← → ↑ ↓ ↔ ⇒ ⇔ ↗ ⟶ ↩
• Symbols: ✓ ✔ ✗ ★ ☆ ♥ • © ® ™ † ☎ ✉ ⚠

Hover over a symbol to see its name and code. One click copies it to the clipboard, ready to paste into a document, email, spreadsheet or social media post.

Paste text into Character code lookup and the table breaks it down character by character:

This is how you find invisible troublemakers: a non-breaking space that breaks a search, a zero-width space inside a password, or a right-to-left mark in a file name. Invisible and control characters are shown as ⍽ so you can spot them.

Emoji built from several code points, such as flags or family emoji, are split into their parts, which shows how they are constructed.

Enter a code point in any common notation, U+2713, 0x2713, \u2713, ✓, ✓ or a plain decimal number, and you get the character with a copy button. This helps when documentation or a bug report refers to a character only by its code.

A few characters are easy to mix up and make a real difference in polished writing:

• Hyphen (-) joins words: well-known, e-mail.
• En dash (–) marks ranges: pages 10–20, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., New York–London flight.
• Em dash (—) sets off a thought in a sentence—like this. US style usually writes it without spaces.
• Curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) are the typographic quotes used in published text; straight quotes (" ') belong in code. The right single quote ’ is also the correct apostrophe: don’t.
• Non-breaking space keeps two parts together on one line, such as 10 kg or Mr. Smith. In HTML it is  .
• Multiplication sign (×) is the proper character for dimensions like 1920 × 1080, rather than the letter x.

Word processors often convert these automatically; in plain-text fields, web forms and code, you can copy them from this page.

Windows Alt codes need the numeric keypad. Windows 10 and 11 also have an emoji and symbol panel on Win + . (period), and on a Mac Control + Command + Space opens the Character Viewer. On phones, press and hold a key, such as the hyphen, to see related characters.

Unicode gives every character in every writing system a number, its code point, written as U+ and hex digits. Unicode 16.0 defines more than 150,000 characters, including emoji.

UTF-8 is how those numbers are stored as bytes. Plain ASCII characters take 1 byte, accented Latin letters 2, most other symbols 3, and emoji 4. UTF-8 is used by the overwhelming majority of websites.

UTF-16 is used inside JavaScript, Java and Windows. Characters above U+FFFF, like most emoji, take two 16-bit units (a surrogate pair), which is why "😀".length is 2 in JavaScript.