computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

, a Unicode symbol is a

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

character which is not part of a script used to write a natural language, but is nonetheless available for use as part of a text. Many of the symbols are drawn from existing character sets or ISO/

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...

or other national and international standards. The Unicode Standard states that "The universe of symbols is rich and open-ended," but that in order to be considered, a symbol must have a "demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text." This makes the issue of what symbols to encode and how symbols should be encoded more complicated than the issues surrounding writing systems. Unicode focuses on symbols that make sense in a one-dimensional plain-text context. For example, the typical two-dimensional arrangement of electronic diagram symbols justifies their exclusion. (

Box-drawing character Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. Box-drawing characters typically only work well with monospaced fonts. ...

s are a partial exception, for legacy purposes, and a number of electronic diagram symbols are indeed encoded in Unicode's

Miscellaneous Technical Miscellaneous Technical is a Unicode block ranging from U+2300 to U+23FF, which contains various common symbols which are related to and used in the various technical, programming language, and academic professions. For example: * Symbol ⌂ (H ...

block.) For adequate treatment in plain text, symbols must also be displayable in a

monochromatic A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochro ...

setting. Even with these limitations monochromatic, one-dimensional and standards-based the domain of potential Unicode symbols is extensive. (However,

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conv ...

ideogram An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by famili ...

s, graphic

symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...

s that were admitted into Unicode, allow colors although the colors are not standardized.)

Symbol block list

There are , including the following symbol blocks: * Alphanumeric variants (based on

Latin characters in Unicode Over a thousand characters from the Latin script are encoded in the Unicode Standard, grouped in several basic and extended Latin blocks. The extended ranges contain mainly precomposed letters plus diacritics that are equivalently encoded with c ...

) ** Currency Symbols (U+20A0–U+20CF) ** General Punctuation (U+2000–U+206F) ** Letterlike Symbols (U+2100–U+214F) **

Number Forms Number Forms is a Unicode block containing Unicode compatibility characters that have specific meaning as numbers, but are constructed from other characters. They consist primarily of vulgar fractions and Roman numerals. In addition to the cha ...

(U+2150–U+218F) ** Phonetic symbols (including IPA) (various blocks) ** Superscripts and Subscripts (U+2070–U+209F) * Enclosed variants ** Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement (1F100–1F1FF) **

Enclosed Alphanumerics Enclosed Alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop. It is currently fully allocated. Within the Basic Multilingual Plan ...

(U+2460–U+24FF) **

Enclosed Ideographic Supplement Enclosed Ideographic Supplement is a Unicode block containing forms of characters and words from Chinese, Japanese and Korean enclosed within or stylised as squares, brackets, or circles. It contains three such characters containing one or more ...

(1F200–1F2FF) * Arrows ** Arrows (U+2190–U+21FF) ** Dingbats arrows (U+2794–U+27BF) **

Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows is a Unicode block containing arrows and geometric shapes with various fills, astrological symbols, technical symbols, intonation marks, and others. Block Emoji The Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows block co ...

(U+2B00–U+2BFF) **

Supplemental Arrows-A Supplemental Arrows-A is a Unicode block containing various arrow symbols. Block History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Supplemental Arrows-A block: See also ...

(U+27F0–U+27FF) **

Supplemental Arrows-B Supplemental Arrows-B is a Unicode block containing miscellaneous arrows, arrow tails, crossing arrows used in knot descriptions, curved arrows, and harpoons. Block Emoji The Supplemental Arrows-B block contains two emoji: U+2934–U+2935. ...

(U+2900–U+297F) **

Supplemental Arrows-C Supplemental Arrows-C is a Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation ...

(U+1F800-U+1F8FF) * Mathematical **

Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block comprising styled forms of Latin and Greek letters and decimal digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different letter styles. The letters in various fonts o ...

(U+1D400–U+1D7FF) **

Mathematical Operators Mathematical Operators is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and set notation. Notably absent are the plus sign (+), greater than sign (>) and less than sign (<), due to them already appearing in the Bas ...

(U+2200–U+22FF) **

Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and database notation. Character table Compact table History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process ...

(U+27C0–U+27EF) **

Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B is a Unicode block containing miscellaneous mathematical symbols, including brackets, angles, and circle symbols. Block Some of these symbols are used in Z notation. Specifically * * * * * * The last two ...

(U+2980–U+29FF) **

Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block. All of the characters in the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block ...

(U+1FA70–1FAFF) ** Supplemental Mathematical Operators (U+2A00–U+2AFF) * Technical **

Control Pictures Control Pictures is a Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purpos ...

(U+2400–U+243F) **

(U+2300–U+23FF) **

Optical Character Recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

(U+2440–U+245F) * Musical ** Znamenny Musical Notation (U+1CF00–1CFCF) **

Ancient Greek Musical Notation Ancient Greek Musical Notation is a Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and docu ...

(U+1D200–U+1D24F) ** Byzantine Musical Symbols (U+1D000–U+1D0FF) **

Musical Symbols Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including pitch, duration, dynamics, o ...

(U+1D100–U+1D1FF) * Games **

Chess Symbols Chess Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for fairy chess and related notations beyond the basic Western chess symbols in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, as well as symbols representing game pieces for xiangqi ''Xiangqi'' ( ...

(U+1FA00–1FA6F) ** Domino Tiles (U+1F030–U+1F09F) **

Mahjong Tiles Mahjong tiles () are tiles of Chinese origin that are used to play mahjong as well as mahjong solitaire and other games. Although they are most commonly tiles, they may refer to playing cards with similar contents as well. Development The ...

(U+1F000–U+1F02F) **

Playing Cards A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a f ...

(U+1F0A0–U+1F0FF) * Emoji and emoticons **

Dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or as ...

(U+2700–U+27BF) ** Emoticons (U+1F600–U+1F64F) **

Miscellaneous Symbols Miscellaneous Symbols is a Unicode block (U+2600–U+26FF) containing glyphs representing concepts from a variety of categories: astrological, astronomical, chess, dice, musical notation, political symbols, recycling, religious symbols, trigr ...

(U+2600–U+26FF) **

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally fro ...

(U+1F300–U+1F5FF) ** Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs (U+1F900–1F9FF) **

Transport and Map Symbols Transport and Map Symbols is a Unicode block containing transportation and map icons, largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' emoji implementations of Shift JIS, and to encode characters in the Wingdings and Wingdings 2 char ...

(U+1F680..U+1F6FF) ** Additional emoji can be found in the following Unicode blocks: Arrows, Basic Latin,

CJK Symbols and Punctuation CJK Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation used for writing the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. It also contains one Chinese character. Block The block has variation sequences defined for East ...

, Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement,

, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months,

, General Punctuation,

Geometric Shapes Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF. U+25A0–U+25CF The BLACK CIRCLE is displayed when typing in a password field, in order to hide characters from a screen recorder or shoulder surfing. U+2 ...

Latin-1 Supplement The Latin-1 Supplement (also called C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement) is the second Unicode block in the Unicode standard. It encodes the upper range of ISO 8859-1: 80 (U+0080) - FF (U+00FF). C1 Controls (0080–009F) are not graphic. Thi ...

, Letterlike Symbols,

, and

. * Miscellaneous **

Alchemical Symbols Alchemical symbols, originally devised as part of alchemy, were used to denote some elements and some compounds until the 18th century. Although notation like this was mostly standardized, style and symbol varied between alchemists, so this pag ...

(1F700–1F77F) ** Arabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols (1EE00–1EEFF) **

Block Elements Block Elements is a Unicode block containing square block symbols of various fill and shading. Used along with block elements are box-drawing characters, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters. These can be used for filling regions of th ...

(U+2580–U+259F) ** Box Drawing (U+2500–U+257F) **

CJK Compatibility CJK Compatibility is a Unicode block containing square symbols (both CJK and Latin alphanumeric) encoded for compatibility with East Asian character sets. In Unicode 1.0, it was divided into two blocks, named CJK Squared Words (U+3300–U+337F) ...

(U+3300–33FF) **

Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols Combining may refer to: * Combine harvester use in agriculture * Combining capacity, in chemistry * Combining character, in digital typography * Combining form, in linguistics * Combining grapheme joiner, Unicode character that has no visible gly ...

(U+20D0–U+20FF) ** Common Indic Number Forms (U+A830–A83F) **

Counting Rod Numerals Counting Rod Numerals is a Unicode block containing traditional Chinese counting rod symbols, which mathematicians used for calculation in ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The orientation of the Unicode characters follows Song dynasty co ...

(U+1D360–1D37F) ** Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (U+3200–32FF) **

(U+25A0–U+25FF) ** Geometric Shapes Extended (U+1F780-U+1F7FF) **

Indic Siyaq Numbers Indic Siyaq Numbers is a Unicode block containing a specialized subset of the Arabic script that was used for accounting in India under the Mughals The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between ...

(U+1EC70–1ECBF) **

Kaktovik Numerals The Kaktovik numerals or Kaktovik Iñupiaq numerals are a base-20 system of numerical digits created by Alaskan Iñupiat. They are visually Iconicity, iconic, with shapes that indicate the number being represented. The Iñupiaq language#Nume ...

(U+1D2C0–1D2DF) ** Mayan Numerals (U+1D2E0–1D2FF) **

(U+2B00–U+2BFF) ** Ornamental Dingbats (U+1F650-U+1F67F) ** Ottoman Siyaq Numbers (U+1ED00–1ED4F) ** Religious and political symbols (various blocks) ** Rumi Numeral Symbols (U+10E60–10E7F) ** Supplemental Punctuation (U+2E00–2E7F) **

Symbols for Legacy Computing Symbols for Legacy Computing is a Unicode block containing graphic characters that were used for various home computers from the 1970s and 1980s and in Teletext broadcasting standards. It includes characters from the Amstrad CPC, MSX, Mattel Aqu ...

(U+1FB00–1FBFF) ** Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (U+1D300–1D35F) **

Yijing Hexagram Symbols Yijing Hexagram Symbols is a Unicode block containing the 64 hexagrams from the ''I Ching''. History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Yijing Hexagram Symbols block: ...

(U+4DC0–4DFF)

References

External links

Unicode character code charts

* ttp://shapecatcher.com shapecatcher.com— Search through characters by sketching one. {{Unicode navigation

Unicode