Special characters — a symbol table you can search in your own language
★ ♥ → ✓ ㎡ ± are not on the keyboard. Every operating system hides them behind some menu you have to know your way around. Here you type what the thing is called and it appears.
Around 2,800 symbols across 66 categories. Click to collect several and copy them together, or double-click to copy just one.
Search works in Korean and Japanese as well as English. It used to match only the English category name or the glyph itself, which meant a Korean visitor searching for a heart got an empty page — so every category now carries terms in all three.
Why not the operating system's own picker?
Every platform has one, and each is different. Windows has a character map and, on a Korean keyboard, a hanja-key menu organised by consonant. macOS has an emoji and symbol viewer. Each requires knowing where the thing you want lives.
A page in the browser behaves the same everywhere, and searching by name beats remembering which submenu holds the square-metre sign.
Commonly wanted
Type the word on the left into the search box.
| Search for | Symbols |
|---|---|
| check | ✓ ✔ ☑ ✗ ✘ |
| arrow | → ← ↑ ↓ ⇒ ⇔ |
| heart | ♥ ♡ ❤ 💕 |
| star | ★ ☆ ✦ ✩ |
| unit | ㎡ ㎥ ㎏ ℃ ㎜ |
| fraction | ½ ⅓ ¼ ¾ |
| currency | ₩ $ € ¥ £ |
| bracket | 「 」 〈 〉 【 】 |
| circled | ㉠ ① ⑴ ㈎ |
Will the recipient see the same thing?
Mostly, yes. Arrows, stars, hearts and mathematical signs are in the fonts shipped with every system.
The drawing will differ, though. The same ♥ has a different weight and proportion in each font, and any symbol treated as emoji is rendered as a picture by the device — which is why an emoji looks different on Android and iPhone.
Occasionally a symbol shows as an empty box, which means that device's fonts do not contain it. It happens with older devices and with unusual symbols. For anything important, prefer common symbols.
Ａ and A are different characters
Documents from East Asia carry wide versions of the Latin alphabet and digits — Ａ, １, ！, （ — which are separate characters from the ones on the keyboard. They exist so that Latin text lines up with Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, which occupy a full square.
On screen they merely look a little wide, which makes them easy to miss. But a search will not match them, a spreadsheet treats the digits as text rather than numbers, and code containing them fails to parse. They arrive whenever text is copied out of Japanese material or older official documents.
The symbols in this tool are genuine symbols, not full-width imitations. To convert full-width characters already in a document back to ordinary ones, the Unicode text repair tool is the right place.
Look-alikes
| Full width | Normal | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Ａ | A | U+FF21 versus U+0041 |
| １ | 1 | not treated as a number |
| ！ | ! | searches do not match |
| （ ） | ( ) | breaks code |
| ： | : | breaks time formats |
Worth knowing
- •㎡ is a single character, not m followed by 2. Search and sorting treat the two differently.
- •Circled numbers like ① are convenient for lists but are sometimes skipped by screen readers.
- •「 」 are Japanese quotation marks; in English text, standard quotes read better.
- •Flags are emoji, so they vary by device and are missing entirely in some environments.
- •Avoid special characters in usernames and filenames — some systems reject or silently rewrite them.
Frequently asked questions
The symbol I pasted shows as a box.
The font where you pasted it has no glyph for that character. The character itself copied correctly — changing the font will show it.
Can I copy several at once?
Yes. Clicking collects symbols at the top of the page and you can copy the whole set. Double-click when you only want one.
What is the difference between a symbol and an emoji?
They overlap. Some characters, ♥ among them, exist as both, and are drawn as plain text in some places and as a colour picture in others.
Is anything stored?
No. Everything runs in the browser.