Special characters & symbols
Click any symbol to copy it instantly — then paste it anywhere. Arrows, currency, math, stars, hearts, accents and more.
About special characters and symbols
Special characters are the letters, marks and signs that sit outside the plain A–Z keys on a standard keyboard — arrows, currency signs, mathematical operators, accented letters, bullets, stars and thousands more. They exist because written language needs far more than the hundred-odd characters a keyboard can hold: a physicist needs π and ∑, a European writer needs é and ü, a designer needs • and →, and a shop needs € and £. Every one of these is a Unicode character with a unique code point, which is what lets you copy a symbol here and paste it into an email, a spreadsheet or a website and have it arrive intact.
History of Unicode and special characters
Early computers used ASCII, published in 1963, which defined just 128 characters — enough for English text but nothing else, no accents, no currency beyond the dollar, no arrows. As computing spread worldwide, dozens of incompatible extensions appeared, and text created in one system turned to garbage in another. Unicode was created to fix this: the Unicode Consortium was founded in 1991 and released Unicode 1.0 that same year, assigning every character in every writing system a single unambiguous number. It has grown to encompass more than 150,000 characters, and in 2010 Unicode 6.0 formally added emoji, cementing the standard as the universal foundation for text — which is why a symbol copied from this page looks and behaves the same across virtually every modern device.
How to type special characters
Beyond copying from a grid like this one, every operating system offers a way to insert symbols directly. Windows supports Alt codes — holding the Alt key and typing a number on the numeric keypad, such as Alt+0169 for the copyright sign — as well as the built-in Character Map utility. macOS uses Option-key combinations for common symbols and a Character Viewer opened with Control+Command+Space. On both systems, and in many individual applications, each character can also be entered by its Unicode code point in hexadecimal. These methods are powerful once memorised, but for the occasional arrow or accented letter, clicking a tile and pasting is simply faster.
What special characters are used for
The uses are as varied as writing itself. Designers and social media users decorate bios, captions and headings with stars, hearts and arrows to draw the eye. Writers reach for proper typographic marks — em dashes, curly quotes, ellipses and the degree sign — that make text look professionally set rather than typed. Students and academics need mathematical and Greek symbols for equations, and multilingual writers need accented and non-Latin letters to spell names and words correctly. Developers use box-drawing characters and bullets in comments and command-line output. In every case, the symbol carries meaning or style that plain keyboard text cannot, and a reliable copy-and-paste source removes the friction of finding it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I copy and paste a special character?
Click any symbol in the grid above and it is copied to your clipboard instantly — there is no need to select it or press Ctrl+C. Then paste it wherever you need with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac), whether that is a document, a social media bio, a design tool or a spreadsheet. Use the search box to find a symbol by name, such as arrow, heart or degree, and the recently copied row remembers the symbols you have used so you can grab them again with one click.
Will these symbols display correctly everywhere I paste them?
Most will, because these are standard Unicode characters that virtually every modern device and font supports — arrows, currency signs, accented letters and common punctuation are almost universally safe. Rarer decorative symbols depend on the font installed where you paste them: if a glyph is missing, you may see a blank box or a fallback shape instead. When appearance matters, test the symbol in the exact place it will appear, and prefer the more common variants for things like usernames or printed documents.
What is the difference between a special character and an emoji?
Both are Unicode characters, but emoji are defined to render as small colour pictures, while the symbols here are monochrome text glyphs that take on the colour and font of the surrounding text. A heart symbol like ♥ inherits your text styling and can be bolded or coloured with CSS, whereas the emoji heart is a fixed colour image. Text symbols are usually the better choice for professional documents, code, and anywhere you want the character to blend in with the text rather than stand out as a picture.
How can I type these symbols without this tool?
There are several ways. On Windows you can hold Alt and type a numeric code on the numpad (Alt+0169 gives ©), or use the Character Map app. On a Mac, many symbols have Option-key shortcuts (Option+G gives ©) and the Character Viewer opens with Control+Command+Space. Every character also has a Unicode code point, so in many apps you can type the hex value and press Alt+X. These methods work but require memorising codes, which is exactly why a click-to-copy grid is faster for occasional use.
Why does a symbol look different on another device?
A Unicode character defines meaning, not appearance — the actual shape you see is drawn by whatever font is rendering it. The same star or arrow can look noticeably different between Windows, macOS, Android and iOS because each system ships different default fonts, and a website can override them again with its own font choice. This is normal and expected; the underlying character is identical everywhere, so it will still be recognised, searched and processed correctly even when it is drawn in a slightly different style.
Are these symbols safe to use in usernames, domains and passwords?
Use them with care. Many platforms allow symbols in display names and bios, where they are harmless and eye-catching. But domains and logins are stricter, and some symbols are visually confusable with ordinary letters — a technique called a homoglyph attack — so security-sensitive fields often reject or normalise them. Passwords can technically include symbols, but a character that is hard to type on a phone keyboard or a foreign layout can lock you out, so stick to widely supported characters there and keep decorative symbols for text where appearance is the goal.