FAQ

Unicode is an international standard for representing characters in digital form. It assigns each character a unique code point, so that letters, digits, symbols, and emoji can be exchanged consistently between websites, apps, and devices.

A Unicode character is a distinct text element to which the standard assigns a code point. It can be a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark, an arrow, a mathematical symbol, an emoji, or a control character.

Unicode includes letters and signs from different writing systems, digits, punctuation marks, mathematical and technical symbols, currency signs, arrows, special characters, emoji, and control characters for managing and formatting text. This is not a complete list: the standard covers different types of characters used to write, display, and transmit text.

Unicode does not support languages directly, but scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Han ideographs, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, and many other writing systems. Because of this, Unicode works with text in most modern languages of the world, as well as in many ancient and historic languages.

A character’s code point can be found on the page for that character. It is usually written in the format U+XXXX, for example U+2764 for the character . On our website, a character can be found through search by the symbol itself, its name, a synonym, or its code.

The full character table can be explored on our website. Here, characters are organized by blocks, categories, code points, and names, and the symbol you need can be found through search and copied right away. The Unicode Consortium also publishes official code charts, but for quick search and copying, it is more convenient to use the interactive table on symbl.cc.

A character is not displayed if the app, website, or device cannot find a glyph for it. Instead of the symbol, you may see a square, an empty space, or another placeholder. Try opening the character in another browser or app, or choose a font with broader Unicode support.

symbl.cc uses its own web font with support for most characters included in Unicode. When you copy a character, only its code point is copied to the clipboard. After pasting, it is displayed by the font on the specific device, app, or website. If the character is not visible after pasting, try another font or another app.

The appearance of a character depends on the font and platform. The same Unicode character can have different glyphs in different fonts, apps, and operating systems. For emoji, the differences are more noticeable because Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other platforms use their own emoji designs.

Emoji are Unicode characters or sequences of characters that are displayed as small colorful pictographs. In text, they are not transmitted as separate images, but as code points or sequences of code points. The exact appearance of an emoji depends on the platform, app, and font.

Yes, emoji are part of Unicode. Some emoji are written as individual characters, while others consist of several Unicode code points. Unicode defines the code and general meaning of an emoji, but does not require one fixed image. That is why the same emoji can look different on Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other platforms.

Unicode defines the code point and general meaning of an emoji, but does not require one fixed image. That is why Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other platforms design emoji in their own style. The general meaning should remain the same, but the shape, color, facial expression, and details may differ.