Gothic Letters (Old English Text)

The dense, angular letters that people call gothic, Old English or Fraktur are all one family of writing: blackletter. It grew out of the rounded Carolingian hand of the early Middle Ages in the 12th century, when scribes in northern France and the Low Countries began compressing their letters and breaking the curves into straight, pointed strokes, which packed more words on expensive parchment. Its strictest form, Textura, is the script of the Gutenberg Bible of about 1455, the first major book printed in Europe. The name gothic was given later, by Renaissance humanists in Italy who thought the style barbaric, from the Goths, and preferred the lighter roman letters that every ordinary font still descends from.

Fraktur, the particular blackletter that Unicode encodes, was designed in Nuremberg in the early 1500s for Emperor Maximilian I, first for his prayer book (1513) and his verse epic Theuerdank (1517); the name is Latin for "broken", after the broken strokes of its letters. It became the everyday type of the German-speaking world for four centuries: newspapers, novels, schoolbooks and street signs were all set in Fraktur, and roman type was for Latin and foreign words. That ended abruptly on 3 January 1941, when a decree from Hitler's chancellery declared blackletter a "Jewish" invention and ordered a switch to roman type; the ruling was pure invention, but German printing never went back.

In English the same style is called Old English because printers used it for anything meant to look ancient, and because the Monotype font that ships with Windows and Office is named Old English Text MT. The name is a misnomer: real Old English, the language of Beowulf, was written in a rounded Insular hand centuries before blackletter existed. Both meanings are on this page: the blackletter alphabet 𝔄–ℨ above, and the actual letters of the Anglo-Saxons, þ ð æ ƿ ȝ, below it. For other ways to style a word, see Cursive Letters (Script Text), Double-Struck Letters (Outline Text) and Fancy Symbols; for the dark décor that usually goes with gothic text, Goth & Emo Symbols.

The gothic alphabet A to Z: Fraktur, the five borrowed capitals and bold Fraktur

Unicode has two complete gothic alphabets, both in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block added in Unicode 3.1 (2001) for mathematicians, who use Fraktur letters as symbols: Fraktur 𝔄 𝔅 𝔇 𝔈 𝔉 𝔊 𝔍 𝔎 𝔏 𝔐 𝔑 𝔒 𝔓 𝔔 𝔖 𝔗 𝔘 𝔙 𝔚 𝔛 𝔜 with the small letters 𝔞𝔟𝔠𝔡𝔢𝔣𝔤𝔥𝔦𝔧𝔨𝔩𝔪𝔫𝔬𝔭𝔮𝔯𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔳𝔴𝔵𝔶𝔷, and bold Fraktur 𝕬𝕭𝕮𝕯𝕰𝕱𝕲𝕳𝕴𝕵𝕶𝕷𝕸𝕹𝕺𝕻𝕼𝕽𝕾𝕿𝖀𝖁𝖂𝖃𝖄𝖅 with 𝖆𝖇𝖈𝖉𝖊𝖋𝖌𝖍𝖎𝖏𝖐𝖑𝖒𝖓𝖔𝖕𝖖𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖚𝖛𝖜𝖝𝖞𝖟. The plain set is the lighter, more legible one and the usual choice for a bio; the bold set is darker and closer to a tattoo or a newspaper masthead.

Five capitals are missing from the plain Fraktur row on purpose. ℭ ℌ ℑ ℜ ℨ had already been encoded in 1993 among the Letterlike Symbols, because mathematicians had long used them: ℜ and ℑ for the real and imaginary part of a complex number, ℌ for a Hilbert space, ℭ for the cardinality of the continuum and ℨ for the integers in older German books. Unicode never encodes a character twice, so the Fraktur alphabet simply skips C, H, I, R and Z and the five older signs fill the gaps. The grid above places each at its alphabet position; a generator that spells ℭℌℜℑℨ wrong, with boxes or plain letters, has forgotten them. In bold Fraktur all 26 capitals exist.

There are no gothic digits: Unicode has bold, double-struck, sans-serif and monospace numbers but no Fraktur ones, so "gothic letters and numbers" ends with ordinary 0–9 or the bold 𝟎–𝟗 from Number Symbols. Mathematicians still use the small letters today: 𝔤 is a Lie algebra, 𝔭 and 𝔮 are prime ideals, 𝔖ₙ a symmetric group, 𝔠 the cardinality of the continuum, so a copied 𝔤 is read by a mathematician as "fraktur g", not as a decorated g.

Where gothic text works: bios, Discord, tattoos, logos, and what screen readers say

Gothic letters are real characters, not a font, so they survive copy and paste anywhere plain text goes: Instagram and TikTok bios and captions, X posts, Discord display names and messages, WhatsApp and Telegram, YouTube titles, Spotify playlist names, Word and Google Docs. Usernames and handles are the exception: the part after the @ accepts only plain letters, digits, dots and underscores on nearly every platform, so 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥 belongs in the display name, not the handle. Every current phone, Mac and Windows PC has a font with these letters; very old Android phones can show them as boxes.

Two honest warnings. Search cannot read them: a bio written as 𝔭𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬𝔤𝔯𝔞𝔭𝔥𝔢𝔯 is not found by anyone searching for "photographer", so put the words that matter in plain text as well. And screen readers announce what the characters are: 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥 is read aloud as "mathematical fraktur capital G, mathematical fraktur small o, …" or, on some readers, skipped entirely. A gothic word or name is fine; a gothic paragraph is unreadable to a blind reader.

Off the screen, blackletter means tradition and toughness at once. It is the lettering of newspaper mastheads such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph, of German beer labels and diplomas, and since the 1940s of Chicano tattoo and lowrider culture in Los Angeles, from where it passed into West Coast hip hop, streetwear and metal band logos. That is why a gothic word in a bio reads as both old-fashioned and hard: 𝔉𝔞𝔪𝔦𝔩𝔶 𝔉𝔦𝔯𝔰𝔱, 𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍 𝕭𝖊𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖊 𝕯𝖎𝖘𝖍𝖔𝖓𝖔𝖗, 𝔐𝔢𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔬 𝔐𝔬𝔯𝔦. When you plan a tattoo, write the word here first and check the capitals with your artist: a blackletter capital on its own is hard to recognise, which is why tattoo lettering keeps most of a word in small letters.

Old English letters that no longer exist: þ ð æ ƿ ȝ, the long s and ß

The Anglo-Saxons wrote English with the Latin alphabet plus letters of their own for sounds Latin lacked. Þ þ thorn, borrowed from the runes, wrote "th" as in thorn; Ð ð eth, a crossed d, wrote the same sound and the two were used interchangeably; Æ æ ash wrote the "a" of cat; Ƿ ƿ wynn, another rune, wrote "w" before the doubled u existed; and the Tironian sign ⁊ was the scribes' shorthand for "and". Ȝ ȝ yogh is slightly later, a Middle English letter for the sounds now spelt "gh" and "y", as in niȝt for night. All were gone from English by about 1500. Thorn went last, and left a trace: early printers had no þ in their imported type and set a y instead, so þe became "ye" and gave us the mock-antique "Ye Olde Shoppe", which was never pronounced with a y.

They are not dead everywhere. Icelandic still writes þ and ð every day (Þingvellir, Guðrún), Faroese keeps ð, and æ is an ordinary letter in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic; the Letters with Accents collection has their neighbours. Here they are the answer to "old english letters that no longer exist", and they make a convincing Old English flourish of their own: Æthelred, Ælfric, ƿynn.

German blackletter printing had its own extra letters that explain two modern oddities. The long s ſ was used inside words and the round s only at the end, so Wachſtube (guard room) and Wachstube (tube of wax) were told apart by the shape of an s; the rule survived in English printing until about 1800, which is why old documents seem to say "Congrefs". The German ß began as a Fraktur ligature of ſ and s (or ſ and z), and in blackletter it is still drawn that way. The three odd letters ꬲ ꬽ ꬾ are named "blackletter e" and "blackletter o" in Unicode because the Teuthonista system for transcribing German dialects borrowed their Fraktur shapes as extra vowel signs; they were encoded in Unicode 7.0 (2014) and are here for completeness, with fonts for them still rare.

How to type gothic letters and how gothic text generators work

No keyboard layout has a gothic alphabet, so the usual way is to copy: tap a letter here, or copy a whole word from the combos, then paste it. In Microsoft Word you can type a hexadecimal code and press Alt + X: 1D504 then Alt + X gives 𝔄, 1D51E gives 𝔞, 1D56C gives 𝕬; on a Mac the Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) finds them under "fraktur". In LaTeX they are \mathfrak{A}, which is where mathematicians get them. For the Old English letters, Windows Alt codes work: Alt + 0222 for Þ, Alt + 0254 for þ, Alt + 0208 for Ð, Alt + 0240 for ð, Alt + 0198 for Æ, Alt + 0230 for æ; on a Mac, Option + ' gives æ and the Icelandic keyboard layout has keys for þ and ð.

A gothic text generator is a lookup table over this page. It walks your text letter by letter and replaces each a–z with the Fraktur character 120,094 places further on in Unicode (a is U+0061, 𝔞 is U+1D51E), each A–Z with the capital 120,068 places on, remembering the five exceptions ℭ ℌ ℑ ℜ ℨ, and leaves digits, spaces and punctuation alone. That is also why the result is a different thing from a gothic font: a font such as Old English Text MT changes how ordinary letters look only on your own screen or page and vanishes the moment the text is pasted into a chat, while these characters carry their shape with them.

Three other things are called gothic and are not this. In American type naming, "Gothic" means a plain sans-serif face (Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, Century Gothic), the opposite of blackletter. "Gothic lettering" in engineering drawing is the single-stroke, evenly weighted hand lettering that drafting standards prescribe for dimensions and notes, chosen because it stays legible in a blueprint copy. And the Gothic alphabet proper is the script Bishop Wulfila devised in the 4th century for the Gothic language, 𐌰 𐌱 𐌲, which has its own Unicode block and nothing to do with medieval blackletter apart from the name.