Cross Symbols

✝ Latin cross is the cross most people mean: a longer lower arm, the shape of the crucifix in Catholic churches and of the plain cross in Protestant ones. There is no separate “Catholic cross” character; the crucifix with the figure of Jesus has no Unicode symbol, so ✝ serves both. ✞ is its shadowed version, ✟ the outlined one, 🕆 a white cross and 🕇 a heavy black one, the biggest Latin cross you can type.

✚ Greek cross has four equal arms. It is the shape of the Red Cross emblem (the Swiss flag reversed), of the green pharmacy cross in Europe and of first-aid kits, which is why ✚ reads as “medical” as often as “Christian”. ✙ is outlined, ✛ and ✜ have an open centre, and the seven crosses 🞡 🞢 🞣 🞤 🞥 🞦 🞧 run from hairline to block weight, useful when you need a cross that matches a heavy or a light font.

☦ Orthodox cross has three bars: the short top bar is the title board, the long middle bar the arms, and the slanted bottom bar the footrest. By tradition its raised end points to the repentant thief crucified on Christ's right and the lowered end to the other. It is also called the Russian, Byzantine or Suppedaneum cross and marks Eastern Orthodox churches and graves. ♰ and ♱ are the West and East Syriac crosses of the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Church of the East; ⳧ is the Coptic cross of the Egyptian church.

Three characters are monograms rather than crosses. ☧ Chi Rho overlays the first two Greek letters of Christos, Χ and Ρ; the emperor Constantine put it on his standard, the labarum, after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. ⳩ is the Coptic form of the same monogram and ⳨ the staurogram, tau and rho combined so that the loop sits on the cross like a head on a body. The staurogram appears in Greek New Testament papyri from around the year 200, which makes it one of the earliest Christian pictures of the crucifixion.

Heraldic and historic crosses: ✠ ☨ ☩ 🕈 ☥

✠ Maltese cross is the eight-pointed cross of the Knights Hospitaller, the Order of St John, who ruled Malta from 1530 to 1798; fire brigades, ambulance services and the George Cross took it over as a sign of rescue. Many fonts draw ✠ with flared arms like a cross pattée rather than the true eight-pointed shape, so check how it looks where you paste it. ⛨ is a cross on a shield in the heraldic manner.

☨ Cross of Lorraine has two horizontal bars. The dukes of Lorraine carried it, Joan of Arc's region adopted it, and in 1940 Charles de Gaulle made it the emblem of Free France against the swastika. Since 1902 it has also been the international symbol of the fight against tuberculosis, which is why it appears on lung associations' logos. ☩ Cross of Jerusalem was the arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: one large cross potent with four small crosses in the quarters, read as the five wounds of Christ or the Gospel carried to the four corners of the world.

🕈 Celtic cross puts a ring around the crossing, the form of the stone high crosses of Ireland and Scotland from the 9th century on, and a common tattoo and headstone design. 🕂 cross pommée ends each arm in a knob; it and 🕀, the circled version, come from Orthodox service books, where such signs mark the rank of a feast day. ☓ saltire is the diagonal St Andrew's cross on the flag of Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and, in blue on white, of the Russian navy. The oldest of all is ☥ ankh, the Egyptian hieroglyph for “life” that gods hold in tomb paintings; Egyptian Christians kept it as the crux ansata, the cross with a handle.

Dagger symbols † ‡ and the upside-down cross ⸸

† dagger and ‡ double dagger are footnote marks. In the traditional order a first note gets an asterisk *, the second a dagger †, the third a double dagger ‡ and the fourth a section sign §, and ⹋ triple dagger, added in Unicode 11 in 2018, continues the series in some editions. The dagger is far older than footnotes: Alexandrian scholars of the 3rd century BC drew an obelus, a spit or “little roasting skewer”, beside lines of Homer they thought were not genuine, and the modern dagger descends from that mark.

† also stands for death. In German, Scandinavian and Central European writing “* 1899 † 1961” gives birth and death years, a name followed by † means the person has died, and in biology and linguistics † before a species or a language means extinct. In mathematics A† is the conjugate transpose of a matrix, and in chess notation an older style wrote † for check. For a typed dagger people also use 🗡️, but that is a picture of a knife, not a text symbol.

⸸ turned dagger was encoded in 2012 for medieval manuscripts, where a dagger with the point up marked a different kind of correction. Today it is copied far more often as an upside-down cross. The inverted Latin cross is originally the Petrine cross: Saint Peter is said to have asked to be crucified head down because he was not worthy to die like Jesus, so the Catholic Church uses it as a sign of humility and of the papacy. Horror films and metal bands turned it into an anti-Christian sign, and in bios and usernames ⸸ now usually signals goth, emo or metal taste rather than any belief. ⁜ dotted cross and ᛭ runic cross are older punctuation: the first a medieval manuscript mark, the second a word divider cut into Viking Age runestones.

Cross emoji ✝️ or text cross ✝: which one to copy

✝️ and ✝ are the same character, U+271D. With the emoji variation selector it becomes the cross emoji, a coloured picture that looks different on every phone: Apple draws it as a plain latin cross on a rounded square, Google and Samsung as a purple or brown cross. Without the selector it is a text cross that takes the colour and weight of the surrounding text, which is what people searching for a “black cross emoji” usually want. The same pair exists for the Orthodox cross, ☦️ and ☦. Both were in Unicode from 1993 and became emoji in 2015.

Choose the text form in usernames, Fortnite and Discord names, headings and documents, where emoji either are not allowed or look out of place; † and ✝ are the two crosses almost every font has. For a big cross in a post or a caption use 🕇 or ✚, for a small cross next to a name use † or ✝. The aesthetic crosses in bios are mostly ✞ ✟ ☨ ⸸ and the ornamental ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥, which are old printer's flowers rather than religious signs. A cross that shows up as an empty box means the device has no font for it; ✝ † ‡ ☦ and ✠ are safe everywhere, while 🕆 🕇 🕈 and the weighted crosses 🞡–🞧 need a fuller font.

How to type a cross symbol on a keyboard, in Word and in Excel

No ordinary keyboard has a key for a cross, but the daggers have shortcuts. On Windows hold Alt and type 0134 on the numeric keypad for † or 0135 for ‡. On a Mac press Option + T for † and Option + Shift + 7 for ‡. In Word, type 271D and press Alt + X to turn it into ✝, or 2626 then Alt + X for ☦; the same trick works in Outlook and WordPad. In Excel and Google Sheets the formula =UNICHAR(10013) returns ✝, =UNICHAR(9766) ☦ and =UNICHAR(8224) †.

On an iPhone or Android phone open the emoji keyboard and search “cross” for ✝️ and ☦️; the plain text crosses are not on the keyboard, so copy them from this page and paste them into Instagram, TikTok or a note. In HTML write † for †, ‡ for ‡ and ✝ for ✝; in LaTeX \dagger and \ddagger give † and ‡ in math mode. Everywhere else, the fastest way is to tap a cross above, which copies it, and paste.