Weather Symbols

Weather in two forms: the text icons ☀ ☁ ☂ ❄ ⚡ that take your font colour and size, and the emoji 🌧 🌩 🌪 that arrive drawn. The text ones are the older set and the only ones that stay monochrome, which is what a forecast line or a spreadsheet column usually needs.

Copy and Paste Weather Symbols

These characters cover the ordinary weather conditions a forecast needs — sunny, overcast, rainy, snowy, foggy, windy — in two forms.

Weather splits the same way most collections here do. ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ ❄ ⚡ ☄ are text characters — they take your colour, your size, and they print as ink. 🌧 🌩 🌪 🌈 are emoji, drawn by your device in colour at a fixed size. A forecast written in a spreadsheet wants the first kind; a message wants the second. Either way you are selecting a character rather than an image, so it travels with the text.

What Are Weather Symbols?

The text ones are surprisingly old. ☀ U+2600 Black Sun with Rays, ☁ U+2601 Cloud, ☂ U+2602 Umbrella and ☃ U+2603 Snowman sit consecutively in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, encoded together in 1993 — long before anyone had an emoji keyboard. ☇ is Lightning and ☈ Thunderstorm from the same run.

The emoji weather came much later, from Japanese carrier sets into Unicode from 2010, which is why there are two of almost everything: ☂ and ☔ are both umbrellas, ☃ and ⛄ both snowmen. The pairs are not duplicates — one is a character and one is a picture.

How to Use Weather Symbols

Weather Symbols in Forecasts and Tables

A row of ☀ ⛅ ☁ ☂ down a spreadsheet column reads as a week's forecast, each one indicating the day's conditions at a glance, and survives being exported to CSV, which an icon set does not. The same applies to a plain-text README, a calendar entry, a PowerPoint slide or a chat message where images are stripped. Compatibility is the whole argument: a character renders wherever the font does, while an icon font has to be installed first.

Typing Weather Symbols on a Keyboard

Only one of these has a short Windows shortcut: Alt and 15 gives ☼, the white sun with rays, because it occupied position fifteen of the original PC character set. Everything else needs the full value — Alt and 9728 for ☀, 9729 for ☁, 9731 for ☃ — or 2600 followed by Alt+X in Word. The emoji have no Alt route at all; the Windows key and full stop opens the picker instead.

Weather Symbols That Render Differently

⚡ is worth knowing about: its formal name is High Voltage Sign, not lightning. It is drawn as a lightning bolt everywhere and used as one universally, but it came from electrical signage rather than meteorology. ☇ is the character Unicode actually named Lightning, and almost no font draws it well, which is why the high-voltage sign won.

Types of Weather Symbols

Sun and Clear Weather Symbols

☀ is the black sun with rays and ☼ the white one — filled and outlined, as always, not colour. ☉ is the sun with a centre dot, the astronomical sign. 🌞 🌤 ⛅ are the emoji versions, from full sun to sun behind a cloud. Use them for a sunny day; ⛅ is the usual choice for partly cloudy rather than fully overcast conditions.

Cloud and Rain Weather Symbols

☁ is the plain cloud, ⛆ is Rain, and 🌥 🌦 🌧 🌫 run from broken cloud through drizzle to fog. ☂ ☔ 🌂 ⛱ are the umbrellas — closed, open, and the one planted on a beach. 💧 is a droplet and 🌊 a wave. Between them these cover most precipitation: light rain, a rainy afternoon, a downpour, and the wet weather that sits between drizzle and storm. 🌫 is the one to reach for when the condition is foggy or misty rather than raining.

Storm Weather Symbols

☈ is the text thunderstorm, 🌩 ⛈ the emoji versions, 🌪 a tornado and 🌀 a cyclone — the spiral used on weather maps for a typhoon or hurricane. 🌬 is wind blowing and 💨 a dash of air — as close as Unicode gets to a windy indicator, since there is no character set matching the Beaufort scale. A storm symbol also serves as a warning marker in a forecast where red text is not available.

Snow and Cold Weather Symbols

❄ ❅ ❆ are three different snowflakes — plain, tight trifoliate and heavy chevron. ☃ ⛄ ⛇ are snowmen, with and without snow and the filled version. 🌨 is cloud with snow, the one to use for a snowy day. Together with the snowmen these cover winter weather without needing a temperature reading; 🌡 is the thermometer when you do want to indicate one.

Moon Phase Weather Symbols

🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘 are the eight phases in order, new through full and back. ☽ ☾ are the text crescents, first and last quarter, and 🌙 🌛 🌜 🌝 are the crescent and the faced moons. The phases are the reason this page gets used for calendars as much as for forecasts: a lunar cycle is easier to represent with these eight than with words, and they read the same in any language. They are celestial rather than meteorological, but nighttime conditions are what people come here to write about as often as daytime ones.

Other Sky Weather Symbols

☄ is a comet, 🌈 a rainbow and 🌡 a thermometer. ☇ and ☈ complete the original Miscellaneous Symbols weather run.

Best Uses for Weather Symbols

Weather Symbols in Documents and Calendars

☀ beside a date in a plain-text calendar or a packing list does the job an icon would, at no cost and with no loading. Moon phases in particular get used this way, because 🌑 🌕 are unambiguous where the words are not.

Weather Symbols in Messages and Bios

Here the emoji are the point and the colour is what carries. ☁ and ❄ still have a place in a username, where many platforms strip emoji but leave text characters alone.

Weather Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The formal names are literal: ☀ is U+2600 Black Sun with Rays, ☁ U+2601 Cloud, ☂ U+2602 Umbrella, ☃ U+2603 Snowman, ❄ U+2744 Snowflake, ⚡ U+26A1 High Voltage Sign. Each tile carries its own value.

The block from U+2600 is thirty years old and supported everywhere. The emoji from U+1F300 upward are newer and drawn differently on each platform, and the medium-weight set like 🌤 🌥 🌦 was added later still, so an older device may show a box.

Frequently Asked Questions About Weather Symbols

How do I type a weather symbol?

Alt and 15 gives ☼ on Windows, the only short code here. The rest need the full value — 9728 for ☀, 9731 for ☃, 10052 for ❄ — or type 2600 and press Alt+X in Word. On a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+Space; on Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then 2600.

Is ⚡ a lightning symbol?

It is used as one everywhere, but its formal name is High Voltage Sign and it came from electrical signage. ☇ is the character Unicode actually calls Lightning, and it is poorly drawn in most fonts, which is why ⚡ took the job.

What is the difference between ☀ and 🌞?

☀ is drawn by whatever font you are using, at your size and in your colour. 🌞 is an emoji: the platform draws it, in colour, with a face on it. Use ☀ anywhere the sun has to match the surrounding text or print in black.

Which symbols show the moon phases?

🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘 in that order: new, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, last quarter, waning crescent. ☽ ☾ are the text quarters if you need something monochrome.

Why are there two snowmen and two umbrellas?

Because the text characters and the emoji were added twenty years apart. ☃ and ☂ came in 1993 as line art; ⛄ and ☔ arrived with the emoji sets. They are separate characters, not variants of each other.

Why does a weather symbol show as a box?

The font predates it. The U+2600 run is thirty years old and safe. The partly-cloudy set 🌤 🌥 🌦 and the newer additions are the ones most likely to be missing on an older device.

Related Collections for Weather Symbols

The snowflakes here also read as decoration; for stars in the night sky rather than snow, see star symbols. The sun and moon signs are shared with the planetary glyphs on the zodiac symbols page. 💧 sits close to the circle symbols in shape. Everything else is indexed at symbol collections.