Chess Symbols

Twelve characters, six white and six black — ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♞ ♟ and their opposites. Click a piece to take it; outlined is white and filled is black, so ♕ and ♛ are the same piece on opposite sides of the board.

Copy and Paste Chess Symbols

These are the 18 characters Unicode assigns to the six chess pieces: a white set, a black set, and a neutral set for positions where a piece belongs to neither side. Click one to copy it. The two most-copied are the queens — ♕ and ♛ — and most of the people copying them are not writing about chess at all, which is worth knowing before you pick one.

What Are Chess Symbols?

Chess symbols are text characters, not pictures. They live at U+2654 to U+265F in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, where Unicode has carried them since 1993, and they behave like letters: they inherit the colour, size and font of the text around them, and they paste into anything that accepts text.

Two things people arrive looking for are not on this page, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise. The move-quality marks used in annotated games — !!, !?, ?? — are ordinary punctuation, not special characters. And the coloured badges a site like chess.com puts next to your moves are that site's own graphics; they are not in Unicode and cannot be copied as text from anywhere.

How to Use Chess Symbols

Copying Chess Symbols

Click any piece in the grid above and the bare character goes to your clipboard — no spacing, no formatting, nothing wrapped around it.

Pasting Chess Symbols Into Apps

Ctrl+V on Windows and Linux, Cmd+V on Mac, long-press and Paste on a phone. They work in a display name, a message, a document, a spreadsheet cell or a forum post, because at that point they are just text.

Chess Symbols in Figurine Notation

Printed chess books often replace the piece letter with the piece itself, so Nf3 becomes ♘f3 and Qxd5 becomes ♕xd5. That style is called figurine algebraic notation, and its point is that it reads the same in every language — a German reader writes Sf3 for the same move, but ♘f3 needs no translating. These characters are what it is set in.

Types of Chess Symbols

White and Black Chess Symbols

Each piece appears three times. The white set ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ is drawn as an outline; the black set ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟ is filled in; the neutral set 🨀 🨁 🨂 🨃 🨄 🨅 is split down the middle, half filled and half not. Be aware that some fonts draw both sets solid, and then the only thing separating white from black is the shape — which is why a board diagram pasted somewhere unexpected can suddenly look like one player owns everything.

King and Queen Chess Symbols

♔ and ♚ are the kings: a cross on a crown. ♕ and ♛ are the queens: a coronet with points and beads. On the board the king is the piece the whole game protects, and the queen is the one that can move any distance in any direction — the most powerful piece, and the one the crown shape belongs to.

Rook, Bishop and Knight Chess Symbols

♖ ♜ are the rooks, drawn as a castle tower, and they move in straight lines along ranks and files. ♗ ♝ are the bishops, drawn as a mitre, and they move diagonally, each locked to the colour of square it starts on. ♘ ♞ are the knights, drawn as a horse's head — the L-shaped move and the only piece that jumps over others.

Neutral Chess Symbols

🨀 🨁 🨂 🨃 🨄 🨅 are the same six pieces drawn half black and half white. They belong to problem composition rather than play: a neutral piece may be moved by either side, a rule that only exists in composed puzzles. Support for them is thinner than for the other twelve, so check before relying on one.

Pawn Chess Symbols

♙ and ♟ are the pawns, the small round-headed pieces. A pawn moves forward but captures diagonally, and reaching the far side promotes it — usually into a queen. That asymmetry is where the figure of speech comes from: calling someone a ♟ means they are being moved by someone else's plan, which is why the character turns up far outside chess writing.

Best Uses for Chess Symbols

Chess Symbols as Crowns in Names and Bios

This is the real reason the queens outrun the rest. ♕ and ♛ read as a crown at a glance, they are a single character wide, and they sit next to a name without the size jump an emoji brings. Pair one with ♔ for a matching set, or with the outlined heart ♡ from the card symbols page, which is the combination people build most often.

Chess Symbols in Game Notation and Analysis

In a post, a chat message or a comment, a figurine move is quicker to scan than a letter and unambiguous across languages. It also survives platforms that would strip an image, which is the practical argument for characters over diagrams.

Chess Symbols in Text Board Diagrams

A full board can be laid out from these twelve characters plus spacing, and it holds together in a monospace font or a code block where every cell is the same width. In a proportional font the ranks drift out of line, because the pieces and the blank squares are no longer measured the same — so post diagrams inside code formatting if the platform offers it.

Chess Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The names are literal and run in order: ♔ is U+2654 White Chess King, then Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight and Pawn to U+2659, and the black set repeats the sequence from ♚ at U+265A to ♟ at U+265F. The grid above prints each piece's code point beside it, so a code can be read off without counting through the sequence.

On Windows, hold Alt and type the decimal code on the numeric keypad: 9812 for ♔, 9813 ♕, 9814 ♖, 9815 ♗, 9816 ♘, 9817 ♙, and 9818 through 9823 for the black pieces in the same order. On Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U followed by 2654 and Enter gives ♔. Mac has no numeric route — use the Character Viewer at Ctrl+Cmd+Space. In HTML, ♔ renders ♔ and ♟ renders ♟.

Frequently Asked Questions About Chess Symbols

What does ♟ mean?

It is the black pawn — U+265F, the weakest piece on the board and the one that can be promoted if it survives to the far end. Used about a person it means someone being played rather than playing, and that reading is why it appears in captions and usernames far more than the rook or the bishop.

Are chess symbols emoji?

One of them is. ♟ was given an emoji form as ♟️ chess pawn, so a keyboard may insert it coloured and enlarged with a variation selector attached. The other eleven have no emoji version at all — they stay the colour and size of your text wherever you paste them.

What is the checkmate symbol in chess?

A plain hash, written after the move: Qh7# is mate. A single plus sign marks check, as in Qh7+. Neither is a special character — both are on your keyboard, and neither is in this set.

What are chess annotation symbols?

The marks that grade a move rather than name a piece: ! good, !! brilliant, ? weak, ?? blunder, !? interesting, ?! dubious. They are ordinary punctuation typed after the move and are not Unicode characters of their own, so there is nothing here to copy for them.

Why are there three of every chess symbol?

So a written position can say which side a piece belongs to. Unicode encodes white and black separately rather than leaving it to colour, because colour is a font decision and would be lost the moment the text was copied somewhere plain. The neutral set exists for composed problems, where a piece can be used by whichever player is to move — 🨀 is a king that belongs to either.

Why does a chess symbol show as a box or a question mark?

The font in use has no glyph for it. These characters are old and very widely supported, so it is uncommon, but it happens in custom display fonts and some older apps. If a piece fails to render, nothing about the character is wrong — try it somewhere with a standard system font.

Related Collections for Chess Symbols

Card symbols are the immediate neighbours of these in Unicode — the suits ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ begin at U+2660, right where the black pawn ends. Dice symbols continue the games run a little further on, and star symbols are the usual companions when a piece is being used as decoration rather than notation. Everything else is on the symbol collections index.