Click any character to copy it. Search by name or symbol, or open a category. 2723 characters across 24 categories, each with its Unicode name and Windows Alt code.
Click any tile above and the character is placed on your clipboard — paste it anywhere with Ctrl+V (Windows) or ⌘V (Mac). Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed.
Currency special characters — Currency signs for every major world money: dollar, euro, pound, yen, rupee, peso, won and more.
Math special characters — Mathematical operators and notation — plus-minus, infinity, square root, sums, integrals and set symbols.
Fractions special characters — Vulgar fractions and superscript or subscript digits: one half, three quarters, squared and cubed.
Arrows special characters — Arrow symbols in every direction: left, right, up, down, diagonals, double arrows, harpoons and loops.
Punctuation special characters — Typographic punctuation — em dash, en dash, ellipsis, curly quotes, guillemets, daggers and the pilcrow.
Brackets special characters — Bracket and parenthesis variants: angle, corner, tortoise shell, lenticular, white, small and fullwidth.
Accented special characters — Accented and diacritic letters, lowercase and uppercase: acute, grave, circumflex, umlaut, tilde and cedilla.
Greek special characters — The Greek alphabet in lowercase and uppercase — alpha, beta, gamma, delta, pi, sigma and omega.
Japanese special characters — Every Japanese character in one place: the full hiragana and katakana syllabaries, plus Japanese punctuation.
Korean special characters — Every Korean character in one place: the complete Hangul jamo, the archaic jamo, and Korean marks and symbols.
Stars special characters — Star, asterisk, sparkle and snowflake ornaments, from the plain black star to spoked and petalled variants.
Chess & Cards special characters — Chess pieces in black and white, all four card suits, and every playing card including jokers.
Symbols special characters — Miscellaneous symbols — copyright, registered, trademark, card suits, checkmarks and weather signs.
Mac special characters — Mac keyboard symbols — command, option, shift, control, escape, return, delete, plus the media and power keys.
Smileys & Emotion emoji — Every smiley and emotion emoji: happy, sad, angry and silly faces, hearts and the classic yellow face.
People & Body emoji — Every people and body emoji: gestures, professions, families, sports and activities.
Animals & Nature emoji — Every animal and nature emoji — mammals, birds, sea life, bugs, flowers, plants and weather.
Food & Drink emoji — Every food and drink emoji — fruit, vegetables, prepared dishes, desserts, hot drinks, alcohol and utensils.
Travel & Places emoji — Every travel and place emoji — maps, buildings, landmarks, vehicles, aircraft, boats, sky and time symbols.
Activities emoji — Every activity emoji — celebrations, sports, games, arts and crafts.
Objects emoji — Every object emoji: clothing, music, phones, computers, office supplies, tools, science and household items.
Symbols emoji — Every symbol emoji — hearts, signs, arrows, religious and zodiac symbols, numbers, punctuation and keycaps.
Flags emoji — Every flag emoji: country and territory flags, subdivision flags, and banners like the pirate and rainbow flags.
Emoji to copy and paste — Every emoji in Unicode 17.0, grouped the way the standard groups them. Skin-tone variants are omitted.
Will these characters work everywhere?
Every character here is standard Unicode, so it renders in modern browsers, documents, spreadsheets and messaging apps. Very old systems or fonts with limited coverage may substitute a fallback box — emoji in particular are drawn differently by each platform.
Frequently asked questions
What is a special character?
A special character is any character that is not a plain letter or digit — punctuation, currency signs, mathematical operators, arrows, accented letters, symbols and emoji. In practice people use the term for anything that is not on a standard keyboard and therefore has to be copied or typed with a shortcut.
Every character on this site is standard Unicode, which means it is part of the same universal character set your browser, phone and word processor already understand.
How do I copy and paste a special character?
Click any character on this page and it is copied to your clipboard immediately. Then paste it wherever you need it with Ctrl+V on Windows and Linux, or Command+V on a Mac.
Nothing is installed and no font is downloaded — you are copying the character itself, so it keeps working after you paste it.
Alt codes need a real numeric keypad with Num Lock on; the number row above the letters will not work. On a laptop without a keypad, use the Character Map app or the emoji panel with Windows+. instead.
How do I type special characters on a Mac?
Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for a character by name and double-click to insert it. Many accented letters also have direct shortcuts: Option+E followed by a vowel adds an acute accent, and Option+U followed by a vowel adds an umlaut.
Holding down a letter key on a Mac also pops up a small menu of its accented variants.
How do I type special characters on a phone?
On both iPhone and Android, press and hold a key on the on-screen keyboard to reveal related characters — holding the letter e offers é è ê ë, and holding the currency key offers other currency signs.
For anything else, copying from a page like this one is usually faster than hunting through keyboard layouts.
What is an Alt code?
An Alt code is a numeric shortcut for typing a character on Windows. Codes beginning with a zero, such as Alt+0233 for é, refer to the Windows-1252 character set, while codes without the leading zero refer to the older IBM code page.
Alt codes only cover a few hundred characters. Anything beyond that range — most arrows, Greek letters, kana and emoji — has no Alt code and has to be copied or inserted another way.
Why does a character show as a box, a question mark or tofu?
An empty rectangle, often called tofu, means the character arrived intact but the font in use has no drawing for it. Switching to a font with wider coverage, such as Noto Sans, usually fixes it.
ASCII is a 1960s standard covering 128 characters — the unaccented English alphabet, digits and basic punctuation. Unicode is its modern successor and covers more than 150,000 characters across every writing system, plus symbols and emoji.
Unicode includes ASCII as its first 128 characters, so plain English text is valid in both. Everything on this site beyond the basic keyboard is Unicode.
Some emoji are built from several code points joined together — a flag, a skin tone or a family emoji — which is why they cannot have an Alt code and why deleting one sometimes takes more than one keypress.
Can I use special characters in passwords and usernames?
Special characters generally make passwords stronger, and most sites accept common punctuation such as ! @ # $ % and &. Some systems still reject spaces, quotes or non-Latin characters, so a password that works on one site may be refused by another.
Usernames, file names and web addresses are stricter. Characters such as / \ : * ? " < > and | are reserved by operating systems and will usually be rejected or silently replaced.
Will these characters look the same everywhere?
The character itself is preserved wherever you paste it, but its appearance depends on the font. Emoji in particular are drawn differently by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, so the same character can look noticeably different on another device.
Older systems and fonts with limited coverage may substitute a fallback shape. Widely used characters such as accented letters, currency signs and basic punctuation are safe almost everywhere.
How do I insert special characters in Word, Google Docs or Excel?
In Microsoft Word, use Insert then Symbol, or type a Unicode code point such as 20AC and press Alt+X to turn it into €. In Google Docs, use Insert then Special characters, where you can search by name or draw the shape you want.
In Excel, the CHAR and UNICHAR functions insert a character from its code — UNICHAR(8364) returns €. Copying from this page works in all three.