Minecraft Symbols

Java Edition draws text with its own bitmap font, Mojangles, split over three sheets: ascii.png for plain letters and digits, accented.png for accented Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters, and nonlatin_european.png for other scripts and most symbols. The top sheet still carries the symbol half of code page 437, the IBM PC character set from 1981, which is why the shades ░ ▒ ▓ █ ▀ ▄ ▌ ▐, the box lines ─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ ═ ║ ╔ ╗ ╚ ╝, the Greek letters α β π Σ Ω and signs like ° ± ÷ ≈ √ ∞ ½ ¼ « » look crisp and blocky in a book or on a sign. The symbols people remember from old sign tutorials, ☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ • ○ ♪ ♫ ♂ ♀ ‼ ¶ ↑ ↓ → ← ↔ ▲ ▼, are drawn on the same sheets. A few of that set, ☼ ► ◄ ↕ ▬, have no Mojangles glyph and are drawn by the fallback font instead, so they come out thinner than their neighbours.

Anything Mojangles lacks falls back to GNU Unifont, a monochrome font that covers almost all of Unicode, so a star ★, an arrow ➜ or a tick ✔ renders fine in Java, just in a lighter, single-pixel style, and a true blank box appears only for characters no font has. Since Java 1.20.2 the game also draws 44 emoji as proper pixel icons: ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ ☄ ☔ ❄ ⛄ ⛈ ⚡ ☺ ☹ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ ❤ ❣ ♂ ♀ ⛏ 🪓 ⚔ 🗡 🏹 🔱 🎣 🪣 🧪 ⚗ ⚓ ✂ ☠ ⚠ ✔ ☑ ☮ ☯ 🔥 🌊 🍖 🔔 ⏳ ✉. Other emoji show as Unifont outlines, and sequences built from several code points, such as skin tones or 🐻‍❄️, fall apart into their pieces. Bedrock Edition is stricter: it cannot show any character above U+FFFF, which rules out most modern emoji (🪓 🔥 🧟 🐷 appear as nothing), while everything in this page's text-symbol groups is in range and renders.

The § sign: Minecraft colour codes and formatting codes

The section sign § followed by one character changes the style of the text after it. Colours are §0 black, §1 dark blue, §2 dark green, §3 dark aqua, §4 dark red, §5 dark purple, §6 gold, §7 grey, §8 dark grey, §9 blue, §a green, §b aqua, §c red, §d light purple, §e yellow and §f white. Formatting is §l bold, §o italic, §k obfuscated (the scrambling, enchantment-style flicker), and §r resets everything; §m strikethrough and §n underline exist on Java only. Put the colour first and the style after it, §c§lWARNING, because a new colour code clears bold and italic. Bedrock adds §g Minecoin gold and, since 1.19.80, material colours: §h quartz, §i iron, §j netherite, §m redstone, §n copper, §p gold, §q emerald, §s diamond, §t lapis, §u amethyst, §v resin and §w party blue.

Where you can type the code is the part most copy-paste pages get wrong. On Bedrock, § works in nearly every text box: chat, signs and hanging signs, anvil and cartography-table names, name tags, books and world names. On Java it is a character the game refuses in play: sending it in chat disconnects you, even in single player, and since 1.21.6 it cannot be typed or pasted into a book either. Java gets its colour from commands instead, /tellraw, /title and sign and item text components, and from server plugins, which accept & in place of § (&6Gold) in chat, nicknames, scoreboards and MOTDs. The § itself is typed with Alt 0167 on Windows, Option 6 on a Mac, or simply copied from the top of this page.

Symbols for signs, item names, books and chat

A sign holds four lines, and since 1.8 the limit per line is the pixel width of the text rather than a fixed 15 characters, so narrow symbols such as │ ! · leave room for more and wide ones such as █ ♥ ▲ take it away. Since 1.20 both faces of a sign can be written, dye colours all four lines, and glow ink makes the text shine in the dark. A sign reads best with one symbol per line as a bullet (► Shop, → Mine, ♥ Home) or a row of shades as a bar. Anvil names are capped at 50 characters on Java and 30 on Bedrock, which is enough for ⚔ Nightfall ⚔ or ✦ Lucky Pick ✦; a renamed name tag carries the same characters onto a mob, and on Bedrock a § code in the name colours the tag floating above it.

Java chat takes 256 characters and shows every symbol on this page; emoji above U+FFFF appear as outlines rather than colour. Books accept the full set as well and are the one place where a frame of ╔ ═ ╗ ║ ╚ ╝ around a title really pays off. Usernames are the exception everywhere: a Java name is 3 to 16 characters of letters, digits and underscore only, and a Bedrock name is your Xbox gamertag, up to 12 characters of letters, digits and spaces, so symbols go into nicknames set by a server, into a world or server name, or into skins and banners instead. For decorated gamer names in other games see the Nickname Symbols and Fancy Symbols collections; the Box Drawing Characters and Block & Shade Characters pages have the complete line and shade sets if the sheet here is not enough.

Bedrock's own emoji and the HUD symbols people search for

Bedrock has a private set of coloured icons that live in the Unicode private-use range, so they exist only inside the game. They can be typed anywhere ordinary letters can, on signs, in chat, in books and item names, by shortcode: :heart: for a health heart, :shank: for a hunger drumstick, :armor:, :furnace:, :crafting_table:, :wood_pickaxe:, :wood_sword:, :minecoin:, :solid_star: and :hollow_star:, plus every controller, mouse and touch button (:xbox_face_button_down:, :mouse_left_button:, :touch_jump:). None of them is a Unicode character you can copy from a website; the nearest copyable stand-ins are ♥ ❤ for the heart, 🍖 🍗 for the shank, ⛏ for the pickaxe and ★ ☆ for the stars, and those also work in Java.

The symbols drawn on the screen itself are the other meaning of the search. The ten hearts are health, each worth two points of twenty, and they turn yellow with absorption, flash with poison and go dark with the Wither effect; the ten drumsticks are hunger, the row of chestplates is armour, and the green bar with a number is experience. In chat, a message wrapped in angle brackets, <Steve> hi, is a player, while plain lines are the server. The scrambled text over an enchanting table is covered in the last section. For the generic emoji people use in posts about the game, see Social Media Emoji & Symbols and Gaming Emoji; for Minecraft Discord servers, the channel separators and role icons live in Discord Symbols.

The enchanting table language

The runes on the enchanting table are the Standard Galactic Alphabet, invented by Tom Hall for the Commander Keen games in 1990 and borrowed by Mojang for the table's flavour text. It is a simple substitution: each rune stands for one Latin letter, with no capitals and no digits. The three to five words shown beside each option are picked at random from a fixed list and have nothing to do with the enchantment you get, which is why no guide can read them for you; the list hides jokes such as the elder scrolls, klaatu berata niktu, xyzzy, embiggen and a line of Lovecraft's Cthulhu chant.

Unicode has no code points for the alphabet, so there is nothing to copy here, and a page that offers 'enchantment symbols to paste' is giving you look-alikes from other scripts. The honest way to write in it is inside the game: Java ships the font as minecraft:alt, so a text component with "font":"minecraft:alt" on a sign, in a book or a /tellraw renders ordinary letters as runes, and a resource pack can switch the whole game to it. Bedrock keeps the same glyphs in its ascii_sga.png sheet for the table only. Outside the game, a translator tool or an image is the only faithful way to show it.