Goth symbols and their meanings
The black heart is the centre of the whole aesthetic: it says love, but in black, and on its own it reads as goth, grief or dark humour depending on who sends it. Around it sit the classic goth emoji: skull and skull and crossbones (the first is also internet slang for "I'm dead", the second looks like a poison label), bat, spider web and spider, coffin and headstone, chains, wilted flower (a drooping rose on most phones) and drop of blood. candle, dagger and black cat finish the set.
The text symbols are what goths actually put in names, because they stay black in any font. † dagger is a printer's footnote mark that European genealogies also use to mark a date of death, which is exactly why it feels right next to a name. ⸸ turned dagger is the same mark upside down and the single most copied goth symbol of the last few years. shadowed cross, Latin cross, outlined cross and cross of Lorraine cover the church side of gothic style, from cathedral windows to Siouxsie-era jewellery.
The occult row is for witchy and darker bios. pentagram is the upright five-pointed star of Wicca and folk magic; inverted pentagram, point down, is the one associated with the Church of Satan and with metal album covers, so pick the direction on purpose. 𖤐 looks like a bolder pentagram and is the most popular of the three in usernames, though it is really a letter of the Bamum script of Cameroon. , the alchemists' sign for black sulfur, is the shape goths know as the Leviathan cross, Black Moon Lilith is an astrology point named after the first wife of Adam in Jewish legend, and ankh is the Egyptian sign of life that The Hunger made a vampire emblem. and are the text moons, and new moon is the darkest emoji sky there is.
Emo emoji: broken hearts, rain and loud music
Emo is goth's younger, louder cousin, and its emoji are about feelings rather than the grave. broken heart and black heart together are the signature pair; grey heart is for numb days and mending heart for the morning after. The faces go from a quiet pensive face and disappointed face to the full loudly crying face, with face in clouds and face exhaling for dissociating and sighing, and upside-down face for "I'm fine". hole is the emo joke for wanting to disappear into the floor.
Weather does a lot of work: cloud with rain, thunderstorm and fog set the mood of a MySpace-era profile song. Then there is the music that defines the scene: guitar, microphone, drum and above all headphone, the emoji for being alone with an album. safety pin and link are the punk hardware, optical disk the burned mix CD, and wilted flower belongs to both tribes.
Grunge and scene bios borrow from the same pile but add the warning signs: radioactive, biohazard, warning and high voltage next to black flag and , the circled A that punk turned into the anarchy symbol. For a name you can use the x marks , the pointed stars , the black shapes and the spade ; witch house and dark-aesthetic names in particular are built from triangles and crosses, as in †.
Goth text symbols vs goth emoji: which to use where
Text symbols such as † ⸸ are plain Unicode characters. They take the colour of the text around them, stay sharp at small sizes and are accepted in most places that block emoji, which makes them the right choice for Discord and Roblox names, game tags, Steam and Twitch handles and the display name on TikTok. Emoji such as are full-colour pictures and stand out more, so they belong in bios, captions and messages. One emoji with a few text symbols on each side, as in ⸸ ⸸, usually looks better than a row of emoji.
Some characters exist in both forms. and are text symbols by default and become the colour emoji when followed by the emoji variation selector; copying from this page gives you the emoji form, and most apps let you type the plain one from a symbol keyboard. work the same way. If a symbol shows up as an empty box, the viewer's device has no font for it: 𖤐, and 𓂀 (the Eye of Horus hieroglyph) are the usual victims on older phones, while † display almost everywhere.
Instagram usernames accept only letters, numbers, dots and underscores, so put goth symbols in the display name and bio instead. Bios also have character limits (150 on Instagram, 80 on TikTok), and a long divider counts against them.
Where goth and emo come from
Goth grew out of British post-punk at the end of the 1970s. Bauhaus released "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in 1979, the music press was writing about "punk gothique" by 1981, and the Batcave club in London, opened in 1982, gave the look a home: black lace and leather, pale faces, dark eyeliner, crucifixes and bats. The imagery came from Victorian mourning dress, Dracula films and gothic novels, which is why the symbols on this page are crosses, coffins, bats and candles rather than anything invented for the internet.
Emo started in the mid-1980s hardcore scene of Washington, D.C., where bands such as Rites of Spring played a more confessional kind of punk that got tagged "emotional hardcore". It went mainstream in the mid-2000s with My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Paramore, side fringes, skinny jeans and MySpace, and that is the era the style of bio imitates. Both subcultures came back on TikTok in the early 2020s, which is where most of the goth and emo emoji combos on this page are now used.
How to type goth symbols on a keyboard
There is no goth symbol on a normal keyboard, but a few are close. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0134 on the numeric keypad for † or 0135 for ‡, or press Win . for the emoji panel and search "skull", "bat" or "black heart". On a Mac, Option T types † and Option Shift 7 types ‡; Control Command Space opens the emoji picker. In Discord, type :black_heart:, :skull: or :bat:. In HTML, † gives † and ‡ gives ‡.
The crosses, pentagrams, moons and ⸸ have no shortcuts at all, so the practical way is to copy them from this page and paste them where you need them.
Symboler
135Klik på et symbol for at kopiere det og åbne dets side.
Crosses and daggers
text symbols that stay black in any name
Rain, roses and ruins
the scenery of a goth or emo mood
How to use them
6 situationsKlik for at kopiereGoth & Emo Symbols combos
16Godt at vide
- The dagger † that goths put next to their names is a footnote mark by trade, and in German and other European genealogies it is placed before a person's date of death.
- 𖤐, the boldest-looking pentagram on the page, is not a pentagram at all: it is a letter of the Bamum script, invented for the Bamum kingdom in Cameroon around 1900.
- The four pentagrams only entered Unicode in version 6.0 in 2010, the same year the black heart's red siblings arrived; itself and followed in 2016.
- ⸸ turned dagger was added in 2012 for editing medieval manuscripts, where scribes drew daggers as marks in the margin; usernames adopted it within a few years.
- is a Japanese map symbol for a graveyard, and came into Unicode from the Wingdings font, which is why both look older than the emoji skulls.
Ofte stillede spørgsmål
7How do I copy and paste goth symbols?
Tap or click any symbol on this page to copy it, then paste it into your bio, name or message with a long press or Ctrl/Cmd V. Every combo above copies as one piece.
What does the black heart emoji mean?
black heart means love with a dark edge: goth or emo style, grief and sympathy, dark humour, or just a black-and-white aesthetic. From a friend it is usually affection in their own style; after bad news it is condolence.
What symbols do goths use?
Crosses † ‡, the turned dagger ⸸, pentagrams 𖤐, moons , the ankh and emoji such as . Witch-house and dark-aesthetic names also use triangles and x marks .
What is the emo emoji?
There is no single emo emoji; the closest is with , and people add to build the mood. and are the modern "I'm fine" faces.
What is the upside down cross symbol ⸸?
⸸ is the Unicode turned dagger , a scholarly punctuation mark that looks like an inverted cross. In bios it is used as a goth and dark-aesthetic decoration; it is not an emoji, so it stays black everywhere.
Why does 𖤐 show as a box on some phones?
𖤐 is a letter from the Bamum script, and older or stripped-down devices have no font for it. Use or if you need a pentagram that displays everywhere, or and † for crosses.
What is the difference between the pentagram and the inverted pentagram ?
points up and is the pentagram of Wicca and protective folk magic; points down and is the version tied to the Church of Satan and to black metal imagery. Both are plain text symbols and copy the same way.
